Letter: Since when did lawmakers turn into the Morality Police?

DETROIT LAKES — When I was in high school back in the 1960s, a curious trend was beginning that was causing extra friction between teenagers and their parents. Some people blamed it on a group of young men from Liverpool, England, and their mesmerizing music. Something we needed to “protect” our children from. Others just blamed it on declining morality in the United States and thought it might be a good idea to start making laws to punish people exhibiting this horrid behavior.

The bottom line was that no matter what they did, boys’ hair kept getting longer and longer and girls skirts kept getting shorter and shorter. Oh, the moral deterioration! Oh, what will become of these poor children!

Well, now it’s 2023, and we have our answer. Absolutely nothing. Long hair is accepted with both sexes (as well as short hair). Women’s fashion can cover everything or nothing and anything in between. Men wear pink shirts. All totally acceptable and determined by the individual without any legal guidelines from the state government.

I bring this up because North Dakota representatives Lori Van Winkle and Brandon Pritchard have taken on the responsibility of legally defining what is acceptable for people to wear and look like and enacting it into law.

They have determined that if someone violates these dress codes, they should be charged with a felony and put in prison for five years along with murders, rapists, and serial killers, effectively turning North Dakota law enforcement into the morality police. (I know this is hard to believe, but check out the North Dakota legislative calendar.)

Of course, they are doing this to “protect the children” and assume that North Dakotans are more than happy to pay $40,000 a year to provide room and board for non-violent offenders.

Their current targets are men that dress in unusual or inappropriate clothing and wear a lot of makeup. I don’t know if this includes circus clowns, but when children see men like this out in public situations, it evidently causes them to question their own sexuality and leads them down the path to moral degradation.

It made me wonder about all the children that flocked to the movie theaters in the 1980s and 1990s to watch movies like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Rocky Horror Show” and “Tootsie.”

In the 1950s and 1960s they watched Uncle Miltie, Red Skelton, and Bugs Bunny fully regaled in women’s fashion. People dressing outside their accepted gender norms goes all the way back to Joan of Arc. (Who, by the way, is a Catholic saint.)

The North Dakota Legislature has plenty on its morality plate without attacking a small group of people whose main crime is “not wearing acceptable clothing.” They have sex trafficking in the Oil Patch, Native American women disappearing and dying, fentanyl and opioid addiction, and alcoholism (some of the worst in the nation) to name a few.

One of my main concerns is, who will the North Dakota morality police come after next? Maybe the next Inquisition of Sister Lori and Brother Brandon will be to find something immoral about you.