> Better to have the demand served open and legally than forcing people underground. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275), "Whether it belongs to the human law to repres

> Better to have the demand served open and legally than forcing people underground. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275), "Whether it belongs to the human law to repress all vices?": > […] Now possibility or faculty of action is due to an interior habit or disposition: since the same thing is not possible to one who has not a virtuous habit, as is possible to one who has. Thus the same is not possible to a child as to a full-grown man: for which reason the law for children is not the same as for adults, since many things are permitted to children, which in an adult are punished by law or at any rate are open to blame. In like manner many things are permissible to men not perfect in virtue, which would be intolerable in a virtuous man. > Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like. * https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm#article2 https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm#article2