In all of the above cases, I would have behaved immorally, but I would have been obeying the law.

But that’s too long ago for a lot of folks, so let me try another one. Until 2003, when the U.S Supreme Court struck down Texas’ law against sex between people of the same gender, there were still nine states that said that heterosexual oral sex was a crime — in some cases a felony — even between married couples. If you lived in, say, South Carolina or Maryland and had oral sex before 2003, guess what? You’re a criminal. And if you’re old enough to have enjoyed a roll in the sack before 1960, you are almost certainly a criminal, because until then, every state in the union had a law against oral sex. And I’m willing to bet you don’t even feel guilty about it.

We’ve got laws against a lot of things that aren’t particularly harmful to the republic for no other reason than that somebody thought that others were having too much fun. So we can’t smoke marijuana, but we can take dozens of prescription meds that come with more warnings than a chain saw.

Steroids weren’t illegal until relatively recently, either. In the Olympics, which has led the way to ban even excessive amounts of coffee, the rule in the early days was anything went. Marathon runners 100 years ago sucked down brandy and laudanum while they ran because it deadened the pain. That was OK, but if an athlete paid a coach or made $50 playing an entirely different sport, he was banned for life.

Steroids and other performance enhancers didn’t get banned until the Russians and East Germans started winning all the medals with athletes who were force-fed drugs. It wasn’t that the drugs were dangerous to the athletes that was such a problem. It was that the wrong countries were winning too many medals that really got the rest of the world angry.

Our professional sports have taken their direction from the Olympics, and fans have taken their attitudes from the preachings of the high priests of the games. If the Olympics had decided that lifting weights and taking dietary supplements was cheating, we’d be staging raids on underground weight rooms and health-food stores.

We’d also be asking ourselves how taking a pill to make you stronger is different from going to a surgeon to rebuild a blown tendon or ligament or to an eye surgeon to have our vision artificially altered so that it’s better than perfect.

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I know: steroids are illegal.

The truth is that steroids are no different than penicillin, caffeine, ginseng, green tea, alcohol and Viagra. They are drugs that affect what goes on in your body. Penicillin and other antibiotics kill infections. Caffeine wakes you up. Green tea’s anti-oxidants are supposed to help prevent cancer. Ginseng is supposed to make you sharper mentally and maybe help your sexual hydraulics. You know what alcohol and Viagra do.

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Everything we put into our bodies affects our performance. Ancient Greek athletes who dreamed of winning the laurel crown in the original Olympics knew that and ate as scientifically as the knowledge of the times allowed. Whatever they could take that might give them an edge, they did. They didn’t have blood tests and they didn’t have lists of banned substances, so we don’t hear about it. But that doesn’t mean they were more pure in those days than we are today. They were human, just like us. If they could cheat, they did.

That’s the way we are, cheaters at heart. There’s good reason for it. Our hominid ancestors increased their chances of survival every time they discovered an easier way to get food. If it meant stealing another tribes fresh kill, so be it. If it meant getting a huge advantage in the battle for survival by inventing spears and arrows and knives, so much the better for homo sapiens.

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We don’t need to find better and easier ways to kill mastodons today, but the genetic drive to find ways to beat the competition and improve our chances of getting the girl or the guy is still there.

And so we cheat and finagle. We take our pills and have our surgeries and hide those bald spots. Some of us fight the urge better than others, convinced by our higher faculties that there is something called ethical behavior and that life for everyone is better when we try to adhere to it. But at the end of the day, we’re still reaching for those little blue pills, for which we may have a legal prescription that we got by lying about our need.

And at the beginning of the next day, we’re still cursing Barry Bonds.

Because, you know, steroids are illegal.