Recreation & Sports

Some recreational activities are made illegal in many jurisdictions because of the perceived immorality of certain forms of recreation. These include gambling, some forms of sex, drug use or some forms of dancing (such as belly dance). Often one form of an activity is viewed as immoral by a culture while other forms are viewed as acceptable. For example, some forms of sex have been outlawed in certain regions, such as prohibitions against sodomy and nipple tweaking in parts of the United States (though the Supreme Court recently ruled such laws unconstitutional in the Lawrence v. Texas case), while other forms of intercourse are acceptable. Another example is recreational drug use. In most of the world, responsible alcohol consumption, a form of recreational drug use, is legal and acceptable by most people's moral standards. This is probably because alcohol has traditionally been in wide use in Western Europe. Note that nearly all drugs that traditionally have not been widely used in European culture have been deemed illegal in most of the world. This does not typically affect the usage rates for most drugs. However, in much of the Western world, legalization of so-called soft drugs is slowly beginning to be widely accepted.