I’m not a gambler. Sure, I’ve been to casinos and played games of chance. Sure, I played in the longest running floating poker game on the Long Island Railroad. But that was just to kill time, not to win money. I haven’t been to a casino in years and have no desire to go. I don’t have a gambling app on my Jitterbug. I tell you this not to demonstrate my virtue, but rather my bias. If gambling ceased to exist, it would not cost me a moment’s sleep.

Yet, David French strays down a slippery slope here.

What is the problem? We are making virtue more difficult and vice easier to access. By the time young men enter adulthood, they’ve been conditioned by a world that makes it ever easier to place a bet and harder to go to college. It’s easier to watch porn and more difficult to form real relationships. And the social results of this gigantic national experiment are exactly what you’d expect them to be.

It’s hard to dispute David’s point. Granted, David is a deeply religious person, and hence distinguishes vice and virtue, moralistic language that differentiates between good and evil. From my not so religious perspective, I still can’t argue that gambling or porn are beneficial to society, in general, and young people, in particular. For that matter, the same can be said about alcohol and illicit drugs, neither of which have made our society better off than it was before.

But the juxtaposition of gambling and college, porn and relationships, is a flawed comparison.

Sports gambling is the perfect example. I debated Christie in part because you might consider him the (unintentional) founding father of modern sports gambling. During his tenure as governor, New Jersey picked a fight with the federal government over the application of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act.

Spoiler alert: Christie won.

The rest is history: Sports gambling is everywhere. Sometimes I feel as if the entire American sports establishment is sponsored in some way by DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM and the host of other sports books.

And to no one’s surprise, this didn’t work out well.

The social costs are extraordinary. In a column last year, I shared some of the terrible consequences. A Maryland study found that 19.8 percent of sports bettors in the state engaged in “disordered gambling,” with an additional 31 percent of gamblers deemed at risk. That means half of all sports gamblers were either problem bettors or at risk of becoming problem bettors.

Other studies found that people with gambling addictions had the highest rate of suicide compared with people with other addictions; another study found a “substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies” in states after they legalized online sports betting.

And it only got worse from there, with gambling infiltrating college and professional sports, and expanding to include “prop” betting on anything from whether the next pitch would be a ball or strike, or whether war would break out in Iran. The disastrous social impact on society, young men in particular, cannot be understated. So if something has a terrible impact (and it does), it shouldn’t be permitted, right?

Put another way, at the precise time when young men and boys struggle the most with sensation-seeking and impulse control, our culture and economy has handed them a device that can function as a porn theater and a casino at the same time.

As I argued at the University of Chicago, the combination of pornography and gambling does far, far more damage to young men than any ideological debate over “toxic masculinity.”

David goes on to compare the ease with which young men indulge in the vices of gambling and porn to the difficulties of getting into college and the burdens of occupational licensure. Again, it’s hard to argue that college isn’t outrageously expensive or that occupational  licensing requirements aren’t often Draconian. They are. But even if they weren’t, would that change anything about the facility with which young people can access gambling and porn? Sadly, it would not. They are neither equivalences nor mutually exclusive.

David then invokes one of my favorite concepts.

During my debate with Governor Christie, I discussed the concept of Chesterton’s Fence. The concept comes from G.K. Chesterton, the renowned Christian writer. Imagine that you come across a fence or a gate that’s blocking your path. Annoyed, you start to knock it down.

But before you knock down the fence, Chesterton argues, you need to know why the fence exists. Sure, it may need to be destroyed, but be careful before you do so. A simple way of stating the concept is that you must understand why a rule exists before you destroy the rule.

We’ve torn down the fence around gambling and porn, which has made society far worse off. But the same argument works in reverse. That gambling and porn, vices both, are available doesn’t mean anyone need indulge in them. We are free to do so or not. Not everyone who has a sip of the demon liquor gets drunk or becomes an alcoholic.

But if we decide to use the law to prohibit conduct that can characterized as a vice, be abused by some, we invite a nanny state to tell us what is vice or virtue, what we are free to choose and what we can’t do because the state deems it bad for us. Sugary drinks? Bad. Supersized kid’s meals. Bad. Smoking? Very bad. Cars that have the ability to drive above the speed limit? Inexplicably bad. Using words that hurt other people’s feelz? Not good at all. The list goes on for a very long time.

It’s not that gambling and porn aren’t very real problems, and regulating them so that children can’t indulge in them is different than prohibiting them altogether, though it’s damn near impossible to effectively accomplish that in the age of the interwebz, but that the state deciding for us, and then prohibiting us, from making free choices to indulge or not, to indulge to excess or not, to make poor choices or not, lacks any limiting principle.

Society can, and should, frown upon poor and societally damaging choices because they lead to toxic outcomes, but either we have the freedom to be wrong or the government has the authority to control us. Be very careful before you take down that Chesterton’s Fence.