Down the Slippery Slope to Sodom
Remember all those people of "alternate sexual orientation" who not only assured us that normalizing sodomy would not lead to normalization of other perversions, they grew rigid and white-faced with outrage at the suggestion that one perversion encouraged other perversions, and they took it as a deadly insult that their sexual malfunction would be called perversion at all?
They told us that slippery slope arguments are innately bogus. They told us that courts of law never operate by precedent. They told us that the conscience never operates by logic, such that if you undermine the reason for condemning a given sin, you also undermine the reason for condemning any other sin of the like genre. Remember all those discussions?
Remember when we all changed the English Language, and adopted comically elliptical euphemisms to avoid giving offense to those who take offense at plain truth plainly spoken?
Remember how every loud-mouthed politically-correct Tolerance Nazi repeated in robotlike unison that it was impossible that homosex marriage would lead to further erosion of sexual norms?
Well, this article suggests that there is a slippery slope involved. I cannot vouch for this article, since I cannot find the referenced language in the legislation. Read it and make your own judgment.
Here is quote from the article:
During floor debate on H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) admitted that this so-called "hate crimes" bill will protect the 30 mostly bizarre sexual orientations listed by the American Psychiatric Association. […]
"The term sexual orientation," this proposed amendment said, "as used in this act, or any amendments made by this act, does not include apotemnophilia, asphyxophilia, autogynephilia, coprophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, gerontosexuality, incest, kleptophilia, klismaphilia, necrophilia, partialism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, telephone scatalogia, toucherism, transgenderism, transsexual, transvestite, transvestic fetishism, urophilia, voyeurism, or zoophilia."…
This is serious business. Mr. Speaker, we can’t legislate love, but we can legislate against hate. This legislation may not rid us of the intolerance and prejudices that continue to taint our society, but it will provide an added deterrent to those for whom these feelings manifest themselves into acts of violence. They will be fully aware that, should they commit a hate crime, there will be no lenience and they will not slip through the cracks of the American legal system.
Further, passage of this Hate Crimes bill will increase public education and awareness and encourage Americans to report hate crimes that all too often are silent.
The article explains some of the terms:
- Apotemnophilia is the erotic interest in being or looking like an amputee.
- Asphyxophilia is a sexual practice, of arranging to produce asphyxiation during sex.
- Necrophilia is the sexual attraction to corpses.
- Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to minors
- Telephone scatalogia -The love of making obscene phone calls.
- Zoophilia -Also known as bestiality
Etc. The good news is that, so far the proposed amendment has not passed. The bad news is that we now live in a society where our legislators and voters are so frivolous, so pusillanimous, so perverse, so faithless, so short-sighted, and so enamored of mere appetite, that to protect the unnatural appetites of sexual perverts as a matter of fundamental civil rights is being seriously debated and seriously commented upon. The reaction of decent people, which is to recoil from abomination, is now denounced as a hate crime.
The law is now set to police not your acts but your thoughts. The thought-police wish to penalize, or, more precisely, to treat as an aggravating circumstance entailing sharper penalty for otherwise merely criminal behavior, not your crimes but your motives, not your acts but your feelings. We are not talking about Mens Rea but motive: killing someone for money is a crime, but killing someone because he is a Apotemnophilia who cut off your daughter’s arms and legs, Asphyxophiliac who accidently strangled her during ‘breath play’ is an abomination to be penalized with the full force and majesty of the law.
In Cloudcuckooland, Apotemnophilia and Asphyxophilia are not the perversions, they are civic rights as dignified as voting and free speech: whereas, in Cloudcuckooland, to hate these perversions is the perversion. We shall have to coin new terms to denigrate the concept of decency: how about Apotemnophiliaphobia?
No doubt some day soon your elementary school will have a quota system in place to insure your third grader is exposed to each and every of these new dishes in the great feast of sexual diversity.
Do you think this is alarmist, or absurd? Think it will never come to pass?
Look at where we are. Young schoolchildren are already exposed to the homosexual penguins and other propaganda, along with being taught recycling and Global Warming and Obama-veneration and the history of the Cowboy genocide against the Native Dancing-With-Wolves Earthfriends formerly known as American Indians. Why not teach the kids to admire and loveurophilia, voyeurism, or zoophilia? The Girl Scouts already teaching about feminism, communism, lesbianism.
Look at whence we come. Consider that even the most alarmed alarmist from one generation ago could not possibly have foreseen how absurd and ugly our current counter-cultural culture would turn out. Reading the Bible aloud in a chapel on Sunday to a congregation of Christians, if the chapter and verse condemns homosex has already been classed as a hate crime among our European neighbors, and a man of the cloth spent time in jail.
Look at how far was have devolved within living memory. In 1930, not just the Catholic Church, but each and every Christian denomination condemned contraception as a grave moral evil, and buying or selling contraceptive products was illegal in all 48 states. Contraception was not the norm, not the way to practice safe sex, not the thing makes women equal to men, but illegal.
Sodomites were still getting jail terms, and the law was too delicate to refer to the practice directly: it was uncouth to speak about sodomy in public because the condemnation was too great. Public documents merely referred obliquely to ‘unnatural acts’. Nowadays you run afoul of the law if you oppose homosex, or speak your mind about it, and it is uncouth to speak about sodomy in public because the approval and applause is too great, and you are accused of racism and worse if you use the ordinary words for such things.
We are once again too delicate to refer to the practice directly, but for the opposite reason. It is as if the word ‘Hell’ – once forbidden in public because it was a swear word too evil to be uttered Christian society, were to became forbidden in public once again because it was a word too holy to be uttered, since the society had become pious and devoted Satanists in the meanwhile.
If you think fullbore public devotion to every perversion from apotemnophilia to zymurgynophilia is alarmist or absurd, tell me what could stop it?
Our innate American sense of decency and good taste? It is to laugh.
Our traditional Christian religion? Christianity will either be untoothed or outlawed if the Toleration Nazis get their way.
The solidity of our Common Law, or the absolute devotion of our judges to interpret the laws as written, never imposing their own political agenda on legislative decisions? Well, the litmus test for judicial appointments is a willingness to do the opposite.
On this last point, one yammerhead on my blog recently argued that judicial neutrality was merely rightwing political correctness: or in other words, he argued that rule of law itself, the idea of neutral and non-partisan law, is mere partisan rhetoric if not a lie. And that yammerhead did not, I assure you, speak only for himself: this Marxist conceit (that objectivity is a pretext for oppression) is a commonplace idea, rapidly becoming the unspoken and unquestioned majority consensus.
In any case, it is not alarmist, merely logic, to say that normalizing one sexual perversion creates an incentive to normalize them all. Once chastity is equated with a hate crime, and sexual deviance is equated with a matter of fundamental civic right, there is no bar in law or logic to any sexual perversion, no matter how abhorrent. Once the customary norms and the unspoken consensus awards to perverts the same laurels we once gave daring explorers or inventors who defied the conventional thinking, no logical argument can be articulated to exclude even more deviant and hence (by that logic) even more bold and daring explorers and inventors of sexual abominations.
Certainly sexual deviations like polygamy and incest, which are, after all, more pleasing to Darwin than homosexuality (in that they are not sterile) cannot be scorned by a society where the median consensus is further down the spectrum toward sexual deviancy, not less, than polygamy and incest.
My Libertarian friends, I am certain, are rolling their eyes and wondering what the objection could be. If I want to eat dog poop for sexual pleasure while tied in a bag with three dwarfs and a munchkin, ‘taint no body’s business if I do! A private sexual perversion is not an act of aggression, whereas enforcing a law is an act of aggression. Since the fundamental premise of Libertarian jurisprudence is that aggression is only justified to retaliate or deter an act of force or fraud, all sexual perversions are licit. QED.
By the same argument, copulating on the top of a bus with your wife or wives, or a whore or whores, is licit, since it harms no one, provided you paid your bus fare, agreed with your wives in your marriage contract to allow for adultery, and paid the whore the contractually obligated sum.
By the same argument, since erotic attraction to dead dog poop of the same sex (let us call this necrohomocynocropophilia) is licit, then both advertising clients and seducing my ten year old boy into become a paying client is likewise licit. Having the Man-boy-dog-Poop League getting Ronald McDonald to urge impressionable kiddies to buy into Bondage-Dog-love is no more illicit or worthy of disapproval than getting Ronald McDonald to shill for the latest Disney Movie by including a Tinkerbell toy in a Happy Meal.
Selling recreational drugs is also licit, so we may should include a free sample of a highly-addictive psychedelic drug in chewable children’s dose shaped like Fred Flintstone in every Happy Meal also, called the Happy Trip Meal.
It is not an act of aggression nor fraud, and my only recourse if I object is to remove my child to beyond the range of McDonald’s advertisements—good luck with that, as practically speaking, this means moving my child to Antarctica or Mars.
The argument is sound if you accept the premise. My logic is that, since accepting the premise leads to a manifestly absurd conclusion, it is wise to reject the premise.
The Libertarian argument overlooks one fact of life: it is a fact that the values of a man or of a society are based on logic. If you accept the premise in a moral argument, you must accept the conclusion. Merely because the argument concerns morality does not make it different from other arguments, and does not make it immune from the laws of logic.
No doubt at this point my Libertarian friends are torn between astonishment and outrage. They will say with one voice that their values are based on reason, and that the law that one cannot contradict one’s own values is the centerpiece and crown of their whole system of moral philosophy.
Very well. If the law of moral logic is the crown and centerpiece of their whole system of moral philosophy, why does it not apply in this one case?
It is illogical (in the Libertarian scheme of things) to apply the emotion of possessiveness to those objects you did not earn and do not own. When the emotion of possessiveness is applied to what you yourself truly and honestly possess, it is a healthy and rational pride of workmanship. What you own, you own because you earned it: what is yours is yours. When the emotion of possessiveness is applied to what you did not make and did not earn and do not own, it is an unhealthy and irrational emotion called envy. All of Marxist doctrine is a philosophical rationalization to justify envy.
Libertarians, in order to be true to their highest values, must and should condemn envy as an unnatural and perverse emotion. Even if the envy in and of itself does no direct harm to other men, philosophy must condemn it, and society must discourage it. Parents must teach children it is wrong to envy their more productive neighbors.
So we see that Libertarianism, even if it seeks to be a value-neutral political philosophy, cannot be a value-neutral moral philosophy. Libertarianism cannot (without self-contradiction) enthrone the appetites as the sovereign whose fiat defines moral behavior, but must place Natural Reason in that position.
By the same argument, it is illogical (in the Natural Reason scheme of things) to apply the emotion of sexual appetite to those objects with whom you cannot have sex, or to the surrounding fetishes or symbols having nothing to do with sex. Making a member of one’s own sex, or one’s sister, or one’s dog, or the corpse of one’s sister’s dog into an object of sexual appetite is as perverse and unnatural as envying what you did not earn. The reason says that the object does not fit into the category which the appetite and passion is meant to serve.
Now, anyone who says appetites do not have final causes, that is, anyone who says appetites are merely a given, and that there is no such thing as “meant to serve”, to be consistent, would have to apply this to all emotions, not merely the sexual ones, and include envy…. Or hate.
By what logic can someone say that there are no natural purposes to emotions, but also say it is wrong to hate?
But if we admit that the emotions and passions have certain natural and innate purposes — if we say that the purpose of the sexual emotion is to lead to the sexual act in the same way the purpose of a hammer is to hammer nails — then we are forced to conclude that no passion can serve two opposite and mutually exclusive ends any more than one tool can be fit for two opposite and mutually exclusive tasks.
The bald fact of the matter is that the virtue of chastity is exclusive with unchastity. You either can tolerate one or the other: not both. If you admire unchaste men or unchaste expressions in society, you cannot also admire chastity and chaste expressions.
As a matter of logic, if you think that Love Conquers All and that all social norms must stand aside when erotic love drives you toward your beloved, whether she is Helen the wife of Menelaus beloved of Paris or the bull beloved of Pasiphae, you cannot at the same time and in the same sense think that Vestal Virgins are admirable and that marriage is sacred.
If you believe, O thou Libertarians, that marriage is nothing but a contract, and that contracts are sacred, you cannot at the same time and in the same sense believe that Dagny Taggart should commit adultery with Hank Reardon.
Let me coin a term. Someone with a sexual perversion is a pervert. But someone who approves of perversion and demands its acceptance is a pervertarian. Most pervertarians are happily married heterosexual monogamists who would never cheat on their wives or sleep with their underage sister or their underage sister’s dog. They are merely normal people who hate decency and chastity.
Pervertarians hate decent people and cannot tolerate them. The very idea of decency is anathema to the dogmas of the Toleration Nazis. They are not content because they cannot be content to allow the perverts to practice their perversions quietly in a corner without bothering anyone: it is built into the nature of reality, it is merely a brute fact of the psychology of how the human conscience operates, that a man betraying his conscience needs approval. He needs not merely to do his business out of sight without bothering anyone: his psychology goads him into believing it is wrong for anyone to be bothered by what he does.
The pervertarian believes it is wrong for decent people to tolerate the pervert. You “tolerate” something you dislike. The pervertarian believes it is wrong for decent people to dislike the perversions of the perverse. He does not want toleration: he wants approval.
He does not want his values to live: he wants your values to die.
Pervertarianism is exclusive. It is a jealous god and will have no other gods before it. Since, by the very nature of the Pervertarian philosophy, it is impossible for a man or a society to embrace decency and chastity on the one hand and pervertarianism on the other hand, even a Libertarian has to make a choice between them.
The inability of Pervertarianism to remain in the morally neutral state that Libertarian political philosophy demands is demonstrated by this case. The Pervertarians will press to have hatred of perversions placed on the Thought Police index of Forbidden Thoughts. Even if they fail once or twice, they will and they must try and try again.
The Libertarian ideal of merely policing actions, and leaving each man free to determine the content of his conscience as he would, is practical only for that limited range of issues where mutual toleration is possible: and the sexual orientation of society is apparently not one of those issues.
Having dealt with the Libertarian argument, let us ask of the Liberal argument.
Suppose we accept that men erotically attracted to other men, or women to women, fit in the same category as black men in the antebellum South. On what ground do we exclude from this selfsame category other men who take other things for their erotic love objects? Liberals say that what two consenting adults do together in the privacy of their own bedroom is licit. But why restrict it to adults? Why restrict it to consent?
Statutory rape, if the minor is old enough biologically to bear children — let us say a fourteen year old — cannot be condemned under a non-arbitrary line of reasoning that celebrates homosexuality as a bold expression of a fundamental civic right.
The argument that a child cannot consent to sexual congress is merely special pleading: under current statute, in several jurisdictions, a girl as young as fourteen can be married with the parent’s consent, or court permission, or both. But why should we have a fetish about the element of consent in marriage when we are busily abandoning the element of man-and-wife?
In civilized law, marriage is consensual, between one man and one woman, not otherwise related, for life. Chastity was the moral practice of focusing erotic attraction to this category alone, and excluding all others.
Our forefathers successfully eliminated the life-long aspect of marriage when no fault divorce became the norm. The perverts are successfully eliminating the male-female element. Once the Mohammedans accept the preemptive surrender of Europe to the Dar-al-Islam, the element of one wife will be expanded to include many wives. The Left no doubt will soon take those who commit incest onto their bandwagon as a cruelly downtrodden minority, and Jocasta and Oedipus, Siegmund and Sieglinde will rejoice that their love need no longer be spoken in whispers.
Once every other element that makes marriage “marriage” is ignored, on what possible ground will the consent of the woman be sacred? I know more than one couple from India who wed through an arranged marriage: it is a practice with a longer and more solidly ground history in Europe than polygamy.
Besides, by this time next century, the Gorean fetishists will be as strong politically as the Homosexual lobby is now, and they merely want to kidnap women and force them to mate, not so very differently than the Romans raping the Sabine women, or Paris carrying off Helen. Wife-stealing is a practice with a long and respectable tradition, older even than the Greek pederasty used by the homosex partisans to add luster to their disreputable practice. Moreover, any modern student brainwashed by his college professor will tell you that there are no moral codes in nature: that morals are merely the will of the weak checking the will of the strong. In the modern world where nothing is sacred, why hold the consent of the woman to be sacred?
I will say nothing of the Christian point of view, but I will say that from the point of view of Darwianisn reproductive logic, forced marriage, concubinage, polygamy, and underage marriage, since all are fertile, are each of them less perverse of a sexual perversion than homosexuality, which has no Darwinian point.
A sexual perversion can be normalized only on the grounds of moral agnosticism or legal neutrality. The moral agnostic says that the mind of mind cannot know right and wrong. The legal neutralist says that, even if we know right and wrong, we cannot enforce morality at law, either because we should not or because we cannot. But the argument cannot distinguish between cases: if the fetish of Joss Whedan for attractive homosexual girls, Willow or Inara, fits into the argument of moral agnosticism or legal neutrality, so then would fit as easily all other perversions listed here, including the ones not currently fashionable, such as the Star Trek fetish for green Orion slavegirls, or the Star Wars fetish for slavegirl Leia in her metal bikini, or the Ringworld fetish for rishathra.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
