Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite

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Few are willing to admit the truth, namely that our cultural elite have abandoned the truth — but that is putting it too mildly.

Our cultural elite, of which the editors of the Washington Post and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are members, have not only abandoned the truth, but have declared war on truth, and have dedicated themselves to the advancement of falsehood.

People saw this coming and sounded a warning. Judith Reisman was one of them, and Robert Knight was another. In 2000, Knight published The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture, addressing the philosophical roots of our current mess. You should also read Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education by Philip E. Johnson.

Whether or not you follow my reading recommendations, the bottom line is this: Good luck with this “secular conservatism” thing.

It ain’t gonna work, and if the history of the past 10 years or so haven’t convinced you that embracing secularism is doom for conservatism — and, ultimately, for the American republic — I’m sure the next 10 years will, but by then there will be nothing left worth conserving. And we’re probably doomed already.

Paul Weyrich — he totally saw it. A nation that would let President Clinton lie his way through the Lewinsky scandal, and accept all those flimsy rationalizations in his defense . . . Doomed.

There was a sort of post-9/11 bubble of Republican popularity that lasted four or five years, but by 2006, that was completely gone. Then in 2008 somehow, that backstabbing crapweasel John McCain got the Republican nomination and . . . Doomed.

Well, the Tea Party uprising of 2009-2010 was encouraging, but then 2012 came along and, once again . . . Doomed.

How are you feeling about 2014, Republicans? What about 2016?

Exactly: Doomed.

Basically, the enemy got inside the perimeter. The bombardment of liberal propaganda convinced both the Republican Party elite and leading figures of the conservative intelligentsia that all those hillbilly Bible-thumpers were, on balance, a detriment to the GOP’s political prospects, so shut up, Sarah Palin, shut up Michele Bachmann, shut up Rick Santorum and anyone else who doesn’t applaud gay marriage as  enthusiastically as Rachel Maddow and Andrew Sullivan.

Way to go, Republican elite! You saved your reputation as sophisticated, tolerant, enlightened intellectuals and you are . . . Doomed.

The revolutionary turning point is now in your rear-view mirror, and you’re all Vichy Republicans, negotiating with the radical Left the terms of your collaboration with their progressive agenda. In November 2008, I explained where we were heading:

The Lawrence ruling was the culmination of what Justice Antonin Scalia called “a 17-year crusade” to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy statute) and, as Scalia noted in his dissent, the Court’s “emerging awareness” argument was a disingenuous way to avoid actually declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy. The legal effect was the same, however, and Lawrence was repeatedly cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision five months later mandating the legalization of gay marriage in that state. . . .
Gay activists do not construe their “rights” in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to — entirely analogous to and fungible with — traditional marriage.
Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists’ indignant demand for equality. . . .

You could read the whole thing — if you’re an ignorant hillbilly Bible-thumper like Justice Antonin Scalia. Perhaps you could also confront the reality that we have weighed anchor, sailed off into uncharted waters without a compass, and are now badly adrift in those regions of the ancient maps marked “Here Be Dragons.”

 

The Lawrence decision stopped just short of declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy, but they might as well have gone all the way (if you’ll pardon the phrase) because we see how Justice Kennedy struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act as though no law prior to the “emerging awareness” had any validity at all. In 2003, the Supreme Court decreed that Texas had no authority to prohibit sodomy. Ten years later, the Supreme Court decreed that Congress itself could not deny recognition to same-sex marriage, and anyone shocked by the hasty destruction of what Chief Justice Warren Burger called “millennia of moral teaching” — well, shut up, haters.

Family Terrorized as Michigan Teachers
Support Colleague Who Molested Boy

 

Girl Commits Suicide; Rapist
Teacher Gets Just 30 Days in Jail

Only one of these stories was important enough to gain national attention outside of the right-wing media. Why? Because in the Michigan case, the teacher molested a boy. It was a gay thing, and only Bible-thumping hillbillies are against male teachers having gay sex with 14-year-old boys. By contrast, the other case involved a man having sex with a 14-year-old girl, so feminists were upset.

Heard any feminist upset about Kaitlyn Hunt dildoing a 14-year-old? Of course not: Feminists are all about supporting teenage lesbians, and to hell with those hateful puritanical age-of-consent laws.

“It was a quiet ceremony. Elizabeth Miklosovic had an outdoor wedding in June 2004 in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, where the couple lit candles and exchanged vows. Miklosovic’s marriage lasted only a few months, however. Later that year, the mother of the bride found out that her daughter had, at age 13, become the lesbian ‘wife’ of Miklosovic, who had been the girl’s language arts teacher at Baseline Middle School in South Haven, Michigan. For some reason, state law did not recognize the legitimacy of Miklosovic’s pagan lesbian marriage, and she was convicted of felony sex offenses and sentenced to prison.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Sexual Anarchy: Progress, Perversion and the ‘Emerging Awareness’ Doctrine,” The American Spectator, June 26

Who knows whither the “emerging awareness” shall henceforth emerge? Certainly I can make no predictions, and it’s hard to imagine the series of court rulings or legislative action by which lesbian child brides could become a legal “right.” On the other hand, a lot of things that once were hard to imagine are happening every day of the week now. The Washington Post column defending student-teacher sex for instance, seemed like a tasteless joke:

All my current friends are 14-year-old girls. We have pool parties and sometimes we massage each other. . . .
Me and my 14-year-old jailbait posse are sick of society looking askance at our Forbidden Love.

No, that’s not from a Washington Post column, that’s Ace of Spades brutally mocking the column, which is funny as hell — the mockery, I mean, not the column itself, which is scary as hell, because editors had to approve that column, edit it, add a headline and put it on the page. And at no point during this process did any employee of the Washington Post look at that column and say, “Hey, wait a minute. This is not just badly written and badly argued, but it’s also grossly offensive and even arguably perverted.” Quoting myself again:

The world is full of idiots with bad ideas and the editors of the Washington Post are obligated to publish only the very worst of them. One cannot reform such institutions as the Washington Post and the New York Times, but can only pray for their well-deserved destruction, because their wicked depravity is not accidental.
The publishers are amoral monsters, their editors are active agents of evil, and their deliberate policy is to employ no honest or decent person. Nor could any honest or decent person ever wish to be associated with publications whose daily business is the destruction of Western civilization. A Christian would no more desire to be published by the Washington Post than to work in an abortion clinic or a bordello. It is a disgraceful stain on the conscience of our nation.

Of course, the editors of the Washington Post are totally pro-abortion — and probably also pro-prostitution, if the truth were known — so exactly why should they be offended by an argument in defense of teachers having sex with their 14-year-old students?

Sure, let’s make fun of the Washington Post, but their editors seriously believe that a woman’s most important “right” is killing her own babies, and if people can believe that, what immoral monstrosity won’t they endorse? At some point, Republicans must either summon the courage to speak the truth — sorry, we’re not going to call you “Chelsea Manning,” you despicable traitor — or else stop pretending that they have any actual disagreements with Democrats.

Do Reince Priebus or John Boehner or Mitch McConnell have any plan at all to halt this headlong descent into lawless perversion?

“Children are not inherently unable to consent” to sex with adults. Pedophiles are “unfairly stigmatized and demonized” by society. Sex with kids is tainted by a “cultural baggage of wrongfulness.”

People need to wake the hell up.

This Weimar decadence is very bad. What comes after the decadence is likely to be worse, and if you listen closely you can almost hear the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Weird to get a ‘lanche four years after I published this, but today I searched for when I first used the sentence, “People need to wake the hell up,” and here were are, eh? The election of Donald Trump, the recent street violence involving white supremacists and left-wing “antifa” radicals — yes, it seems my prophetic warnings from 2013 are being fulfilled.

A nation that has abandoned religion and morality (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”) must sooner or later pay the price for its decadence, although it’s difficult to predict what form the consequences might take. For example, why should sexual deviance give rise to racial hostility? This connection doesn’t seem obvious, but nevertheless the perversity that flourished in Weimar Germany was followed by the ascent of a Nazi regime that murdered not only Jews, but also Poles, gypsies and other “untermenschen.” While it seems unlikely that any such thing could happen in America, who can predict the future? Just a few years ago, did anyone expect we’d be confronted in 2017 with transgenderism as a “mainstream” issue? When you’re off the map and deep into the “Here Be Dragons” territory, it’s hard to know what to expect next.



 

447 comments

  2. Why are we the only ones that see a problem with this headlong rush into sexual and moral perversity? Maybe we are just haters…

  3. It’s interesting that you mention “The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture”. I haven’t read the book, but the title raises an interesting point, though I doubt it is one the author intends. The age of consent was traditionally much younger than what it is now. According to this source, http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/230?section=primarysources&source=24, in 1880, it was 10 years old in most states. It was as old as 12 in a few, and it was 7 (!!!) in Delaware, Why do you suppose that was? Were all our ancestors a bunch of NAMBLA wannabes?

    Of course not. But the idea that anyone who thinks the age of consent might be set at something less than 18 is a pervert is ridiculous. I realize that lines must be drawn, and that no matter what they are, they will be arbitrary. But, is there no way to even have the discussion without someone starting the name calling? Since the age of consent has been much lower not only in the history of this country, but also in the history of mankind, is it possible, just possible, that maybe 18 is not the perfect number?

    Society has every right to be concerned with what can happen to young girls who are put in the charge of older men, and to construct laws to protect the young ladies. But, crying rape every time that sex occurs between a couple of people on the opposite sides of 18 is just plain dishonest. Rape is about force. This idea that someone under 18 is not able to consent is a legal fiction. You can bet that if one of these same 14 year old goes out on a shooting spree, any clear thinking person does not take the position that they were not responsible for their actions.

  5. Ja, wir sind in schnell Schließung auf unseren eigenen “Kristallnacht”. Ich fürchte, unsere eigenen werden viel schlechter als die von Deutschland am 9. November 1938. Verderbtheit und Abweichung sind in unserem Land weit verbreitet, und die Jungen werden geschult, zu glauben, das ist normal, eine Art von sexuell perverse “Hitler-Jugend”, die Stoßtrupps von Amerika hassen progressive linke Aktivisten. Die stetige thumps Sie schwach in der Ferne zu hören ist nur das Geräusch ihrer genagelten Stiefeln knirschen über die Moral und Tradition unserer Gründerväter Ideale und Überzeugungen teuer. Ich für Amerika und seine zukünftige Generationen zu weinen.

  6. Your last paragraph is comparing apples and oranges. The plain fact is American society has extended the age at which children (of both sexes) emotionally and intellectually mature. In response to this, minors are legally not able to consent to a great majority of things, not just sex. For their own protection and the protection of society at large. They are severely limited in their ability to drive, to enter into contracts, not eligible to vote, to enlist in the military (without parental consent) and a host of other things.
    I think Stacy hit it on the head when he mentioned abortion, the first real intrusion into the heart of this matter (where those who had no understanding of the eventual consequences, intended and unintended have led our nation), where the standard now is that any female of any age can have an abortion without anyone being notified, much less the parents. That “standard” is now being used to leverage the abandonment of age of consent laws.
    A standard must be set and most states recognize that sex will occur and that if it is between two minors or a minor and an adult within the two year difference in ages, it is not considered statutory rape. I believe this is a sane and appropriate standard.
    The very fact we are having this conversation is indicative of how low our nation has sunk in the past half century. The fall into licentiousness and anarchy is increasing in speed, much of this because of the rapid advances in technology and the insidious creep of godless Marxism into our institutions. The Cultural Marxists are winning and if this continues (I am doubtful we can stem the tide at this late date) we sane and moral few will soon go the way of the dinosaurs.

  7. Welcome aboard the philosophical S.S. Doomed, Stacy. Actually I don’t know how long you’ve actually been aboard but some of us have been waiting patiently at our lifeboat stations for several years while everyone else danced and chugged champagne (and tea), waiting for that inevitable Reaganoid comeback that would set America right again. *checks watch* The hour is late and we’ve taken on too much water. She WILL sink.

    I’ve said it before so forgive my repeating it: while I believe in the genuineness of the Tea Party movement as it was founded, some of us were shunned on Hot Air and a few other hangouts even before then for saying we were all being royally had by the conservative establishment, in large part by the, ahem, “secular” conservatives and libertarians among us post 9/11. We insisted that while some of these folks talked a good game – and I know a few of them are genuine – most had a different moral core, or none at all, and so would never synchronize with us on some vital issues (file this under LGF, as just one example). Thus they could not be trusted to aid the Republic long-term in areas they found icky to deal with. Well, it turns out that in many cases, we were right. Were they infiltrators? Were they just being who they really were the whole time? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. All I know is, instead of plugging holes in the Republic’s hull, they helped drill new ones. Between that and the feckless GOP, you are 100% correct, we are well and truly doomed. Here’s a lifejacket but bear in mind the water is very, very cold…

  8. For all the (to us) brutality and harshness of that time, in 1880 the extended family unit was usually still very cohesive so daughters were still somewhat protected and supported by loving family no matter what age they were married off. They DID NOT have an orchestrated movement to sexualize and seduce children away from their parents, AGAINST THE WILL OF THEIR PARENTS, promoted by government and orchestrated from the earliest ages in education, academia and the media.

  9. It is never wrong to hate what is morally wrong and repugnant. Immorality and licentiousness abound in our society. Just because we have a small voice individually, together our combined voices can be as a whirlwind, if we can but wake that great silent cadre of those who have lost hope or who slumber unawares of the danger to our nation and world.
    We must wake them!

  10. “we sane and moral few will soon go the way of the dinosaurs.”

    In a very real and practical sense, we already have.

  13. I have no problem with anyone doing as you do. For myself, though, I went to several BIG T.P. rallies in my area. I won’t bother with anything like it anymore. I don’t even read their emails. I know you know why, and it’s not the fault of the T.P. I live just N of the district of the man largely responsible (hint: he’s from the Dayton area). My reason for not bothering anymore is, I suspect, the same as the reason for Palin’s apparent decision not to seek high office. I’ll say no more…I don’t want to be a downer this early in the morn.

  14. I understand fully. I am currently working on a piece about the elites (self-appointed) and the real elites (those who actually are wealthy enough to call the shots) and how they together are destroying America.

  15. Hi Stacy! I haven’t been reading you for a long time so I can only speak of what I have discovered so far. I have greatly appreciated many of your articles, notably the ones pertaining to sexual decadence and harm.

    Collectively, your work is great. But this one! As an overview of the core dynamics that are corrupting our society (the very hearts and minds of Americans) in respect to sexuality and relationships was particularly well written and replete with some of the most key insights.

    Aside from that trademark brash and inspiring McCain energy!

    Great job!

  17. If I may copy here this excerpt to highlight it:

    Basically, the enemy got inside the perimeter. The bombardment of liberal propaganda convinced both the Republican Party elite and leading figures of the conservative intelligentsia that all those hillbilly Bible-thumpers were, on balance, a detriment to the GOP’s political prospects, so shut up, Sarah Palin, shut up Michele Bachmann, shut up Rick Santorum and anyone else who doesn’t applaud gay marriage as enthusiastically as Rachel Maddow and Andrew Sullivan.

    Way to go,Republican elite! You saved your reputation as sophisticated, tolerant,
    enlightened intellectuals and you are

    The revolutionary turning point is now in your rear-view mirror, and you’re all Vichy Republicans, negotiating with the radical Left the terms of your collaboration with their progressive agenda.
    ………………………….

    THIS.

  22. The age of consent is 16 in most states, not 18. In addition, many states have “Romeo & Juliet” statutes that decriminalize underage peer activity.

    As to why earlier times had lower AoCs? First of all, smaller communities and lower mobility empowered social, rather than legal, sanctions. I presume an adult would be less likely to take advantage of an adolescent if they knew there was no avoiding the family members in the community. Second, back then people assumed adult responsibilities much earlier – they weren’t still considered children at 25.

    So, tell me again why you why you think we should encourage adults to copulate with adolescents? Because lowering or eliminating the AoC is, in fact, a goal of those adults who wish to do just that. And the arguments in that Op-Ed were identical to those of NAMBLA.

  25. Help me to understand.

    If someone doesn’t share your beliefs, why should they be governed by those beliefs?

  28. They are governed by the law.
    Your question is the one asked by sharia law proponents and is a further erosion of morality. It is also a false front for imposition of anarchy to the progressives and a mask behind which those who wish to impose sharia on everyone hide behind.
    It is also an excuse to disregard all structures of society and descend to total licentiousness.

  29. Pardon, but you haven’t answered.

    You tried to drag sharia law into the discussion despite the fact that I’m more of an infidel to the Islamists than I am to you.

    If you demand everyone follow your morality because it is the law and you will point guns at them if they don’t, then what is to stop them from seizing power and doing the exact same thing to you?

    Isn’t that what you say the Left/liberals/progressives have done to you?

  30. I don’t want people governed by my beliefs. That is actually what progressives want. I want people governed by laws (not by men,) such laws being consistent with the Natural Law, which is, in turn, a vestige of Divine Law, expressed through the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. (I don’t expect you to find this convincing, I’m just explaining where my politics comes from. It’s not merely my desire to impose my values on society, it’s my desire to impose God’s values on society. I don’t construct my own value system, I submit to the teaching of the Church, having finally accepted the almost inconceivable idea that someone else is wiser than I am.)

  31. The problem with arguing from morality is that not everybody’s is the same. The problem with making laws about it is… well, members of Congress are collectively a pack of thieves, liars and perverts. Do we REALLY trust them to make moral decisions?

  32. Everyone is governed by somebody’s beliefs. When there is an explicit religious worldview underpinning a set of beliefs, the beliefs stand together and protect one another; when there is not, they are picked off one by one. “Culture” derives from cultus, or worship; no society can not worship something. A society that professes “anything goes” will collapse in short order.

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