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

  1. Laws exist only to ease and regulate social interactions, to keep society perking along with a minimum of fuss. Whence come these laws? From the moral code of the society in question (whose origins are in the history of that society’s foundation). Experience is the other source, the experiential knowledge of a society sets it’s boundaries and acceptable behaviors.

  6. Definition of ANARCHY
    1 a : absence of government
    b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
    c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
    2 a : absence or denial of any authority or established order
    b : absence of order : disorder
    From Merriam-Webster online: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy
    1a&b and 2a&b are what I am referring to. That is not a “funky definition”.

  8. The left argues that women shouldn’t have to deal with sexual duress or intimidation in the workplace. The woman who is a employee is dependant on her employer for their livelihood. It is wrong for that employer or his agents to use that dependency to manipulate or abuse that employee. That’s not in the Bible but as a society we protect the weak and vulnerable.

    The left would also argue that those of diminished mental capacity cannot be held accountable for their actions and rightly so. This protects those people from criminal prosecution. It also protects our seniors from nefarious businessmen.

    Children, of say fourteen, are said to be impressionable and in their formative years. They are dependant on adults for their welfare and teachers for their education. Adults who use this dependency to coerce sexual encounters are criminals.

    If these young people can consent let’s do away with the child labor laws the left fought so hard for. Why do we have those anyway? Oh, that’s right, people were taking advantage of children.

    If they can consent and have sex they can sign a contract and make porn videos. Is that what the left wants now?

  10. There’s another definition, not in any dictionary that I’ve seen:

    “A utopian society where there are rules, but no rulers.”

    With emphasis on “utopian”.

    The etymology of “anarchy” is an interesting one. It’s often used to scare people, for better or for worse.

    The biggest offenders are politicians wishing to keep people in line (“It’ll be anarchy if we don’t [insert cause du jour here]!”, or lefties wishing to infer that anarchy is but an arm of their ideology (most anarchist “organizations” [surely an oxymoron] are aligned with goals that are congruent with communist or socialist doctrine).

    Which is why I question that most so-called anarchists today have made genuine “moral choices”; it’s more likely they are deluding themselves while accepting the doctrine of an anti-anarchist ideology that seeks out useful idiots.

  12. My Czech friends believe it is rude to speak in another language in mixed company… but Then I am old and cling to the old ways..

  13. And if someone is not a Christian?

    Do you believe that Western Civilization is exclusively Christian?

    It always amazes me that I have to ask questions like that in a nation where one house of the national legislature is named the Senate.

  15. 1) You justify your beliefs about yourself by your status as a liberal, not your deeds.The most sexist liberal can think of himself as a feminist while the greediest liberal can think of himself as generous. This is because liberals define themselves as being compassionate, open minded, kind, pro-science and intelligent not based on their actions or achievements, but based on their ideology. This is one of the most psychologically appealing aspects of liberalism because it allows you to be an awful person while still thinking of yourself as better than everyone else.

  16. An alternative to EITHER a homogeneous belief system OR a fight for your vision of society.

    One of my rules of thumb, if someone gives your an either/or, immediately start looking for a third, fourth, and fifth way.

  20. What liberals like should be mandatory and what they don’t like should be banned: There’s an almost instinctual form of fascism that runs through most liberals. It’s not enough for liberals to love gay marriage; everyone must be forced to love gay marriage. It’s not enough for liberals to be afraid of guns; guns have to be banned. It’s not enough for liberals to want to use energy-saving light bulbs; incandescent light bulbs must be banned. It’s not enough for liberals to make sure most speakers on campuses are left-wing; conservative speakers must be shouted down or blocked from speaking.

  21. *grins*

    I was hoping someone would bring that up.

    Technically, all vice laws are malum prohibitum . And yes, the moral reason changes.

    Now I’m not a lawyer. But it seems to me that something that creates measurable harm to another should be malum in se. Murder fits that. Theft fits that. The wrong sexual position, not so much.

    Still, the general case stands. Morality changes and the law changes with it. If you really want, I’ll give plenty of other cases including the one we’re all tiptoeing around.

  22. Well said, the push for domination of the labor populace started in the mid 1800s when labor was needed and the ability to critically think was frowned on…

    precursor

    to the NEA..

  23. Practice.

    Well, that’s a cop out, isn’t it? You deserve better than that. I do like the one-liners though.

    Long story short, a lot of study, a lot of talking with other people who had different notions of morality and ethics, a lot of observation, a lot of questions without easy answers, and a lot of sleepless nights.

    And a few metaphorical bricks dropped on my head.

    Still, the question remains. If someone doesn’t share the belief, why should they be bound by it?

  24. It is when you say (emphasis added) “no laws except those that bulwark their control.”

    By most definitions, that is not anarchy.

  25. Which raises the question of which morality should be imposed.

    For example, I think Obamacare is a really bad idea even though it was done For Our Own Good.

  26. Pardon, but I am not a liberal. I’m probably closest to a small “l” libertarian than anything else. When it comes to rights, I’m purely selfish. I don’t do it to you because I don’t want you to do it to me.

  27. I did that bit already. *grins*

    I definitely leaned more towards conservatism in my younger days. Even registered as a Republican when I was 18. It was years before my Democrat father talked politics with me again.

  28. Always a good suggestion. Progressives, by virtue of that ludicrous title, like to think they’re moving the world forward, but all we are doing is following history once again into oblivion. For a book as old as the Bible to literally describe our current situation word for word is either prescient or evidence of historical repetition…or both.

  29. You lost the culture war decades ago and the proof of that is socially conservative candidates getting demolished in easy elections like Indiana, Nevada, Missouri, etc. It’s over. We don’t need institutional Christianity anymore and most people that follow it are pretty fair weather about it too.

  33. Anarchy is a step to the ultimate goal: Neo-Feudalism. Just like Socialism was/is a step towards Marxism (communism) which is a step towards Anarchy.
    Get the process of descent into utter slavery without the chains?

  36. The problem with that is certain people are always willing to force others. For this to work, everyone has to agree with it, and follow the same rules consistently. Human nature prevents that.

    So, unless there is a means to either restrain the would-be tyrants before they become tyrants, them, or for people to protect themselves (without recourse to the government), your “opposite” is a utopian view, and relegated to the bookshelves under “Capital L Libertarianism”.

    Which is pretty much where all of your arguments come from. Your premises assume a state of affairs that the human race aspires to, but lacks the general maturity to live by.

    Gazing at your navel is no way to go through life. Better to learn a trade.

  38. The internet is the ultimate mixed company and writing in any language by those rules would be rude. My use of German in my original was to make a point. Those who frequent TOM encompasses several folks that I know can read German (a few others are fluent in French, another language in my skill set).
    If you feel offended, good, that was my intent. You should be offended, not by my use of German but by the reason I used that language in the first place. To reinforce my belief that our government is almost to the point of Germany in 1938.
    An American Kristallnacht is a very real possibility.

  42. Ah, missed this one. Sorry about that.

    I’m not the left.

    I just want to know why someone should be bound by a belief system that they don’t share.

  43. I don’t understand why the government’s so laissez-faire about sodomy these days. Normally they hate competition.

  45. You’re still not making any sense.

    There is nothing wrong in looking for alternatives generally. But there are times when there are only two alternatives. Think of a practical example, if you would like to see what I mean about rules and society.

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