Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite

Posted on Comments

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. Western Civilization is exclusively Christian in the same sense that I am born exclusively of my mother. I am not my mother, but I am her child and her’s alone. Without her, I would not exist. If you remove that which I receive(d) from her e.g. my body, food and O2 in utero, etc., I cease to exist. Here the analogy limps a bit. I can live w/o my mother. Western Civilization cannot live without the Church. How is it that after your study, talks, questions, observations, etc., you appear still not to understand?

  7. I agree.

    That’s why I don’t think much of what we call “morality” should be part of the law.

    If theft gets the same result as “sexual immorality,” then why punish theft?

  8. No. Enforce the Rights of Man so everyone has freedom within a small set of commonly accepted laws, ie., murder, rape, robbery, piracy, etc. All the accreted laws do nothing more than control the peasantry (most of us) and cede power and control to whichever collection of baboons are in power.

  9. All of us were called tinfoil hat wingnutz for expressing worry about a slippery slope over gay marriage.

    Now look where we are.

    The road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions, it’s been greased and oiled by the willing deviancy of the left.

  10. About what? that’s not how you can be specific. Try this: apply what you are trying to envision regarding the death penalty. Either there is a federal law stipulating the death penalty, or state laws (or local laws). But you cannot have a society where each individual decides whether they will apply the death penalty here and there. This makes no sense. Apparently it’s the irrational path you got yourself lost in…

  13. I’m sorry, but that is very limiting.

    What if it is outside those “commonly accepted laws?”

    What if the baboons are corrupt?

  15. As I said, how do you manage to misunderstand me? What were you reading? To me West.Civ=Church is not that hard to see. You may not agree, but surely you see my point. As RSM says in the blog, secular conservatism is untenable. Or as GKC observed, the world is rapidly consuming its Catholic capital. See David B Hart’s book Atheist Delusions, especially Chap 1, The Gospel of Unbelief.

  17. They don’t have to unless they want to continue living in that society. Society is an implied social contract with every other member of said society that you will abide by their social mores.
    Don’t agree with their laws? Move to another society where their social mores fit yours.
    Easy-Peasy.

  19. Overlooking the things like the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, or even the Tea Party movement, you might be correct.

    But should we overlook those?

  22. If someone told you that you could only trust the Republicans or the Democrats to make the rules, which would you trust?

  24. I don’t hate people because of their sexual preferences, within very strict limits involving adults, consent, and physical safety. I am willing to be perfectly tolerant of others’ sexual perversions, provided they keep them indoors, out of the streets, and don’t expect me to join their particular picnic.

    The trouble is, it’s no longer “tolerate”, it’s “celebrate”. Worse, it’s compulsory, and allows me no freedom to draw my own lines.

    Then the really sick ones won’t stop, and try to erase all the lines between simple decency and perverse sexual abuse. And they want me to celebrate that, too.

    That is not going to happen.

  29. Civilization doesn’t magically exist, but requires virtue. Without virtue, civilization does not, and cannot, exist.

    Sodomy offers no virtue and is therefore, at the very least, not a constructive activity that contributes to civilization.

    If you want a liberal’s head to explode, simply ask them to articulate the virtues of sodomy.

  30. I’m glad that you agree that navel gazing is counterproductive.

    I hear that plumbing is a good trade these days.

  31. No. Active involvement as in the civil rights era. Of course, you must be strong and really love the society you are in to want to put it all on the line to change it. Kind of like what some of us are willing to do, in emulation of our founding fathers who risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring about the change they believed in.
    Also recognize that a great majority of attempts to change a society (worldwide) result in death or long terms of imprisonment for the leaders and frequently death in bloody battles for the supporters.

  32. You seem to miss something obvious. What is it? Ah, yes – that whole power thing.

    A man or woman in a position of authority (however minor – like, oh, a senior who is a cheerleader) who sexually uses a young person in her or his care, whether that child is a minor or not, is coercing the young person. The kid (say, a freshman) may be flattered and flustered into believing it’s “consensual”. What it really is, is rape.

    Legal fictions are sometimes the safe way to hold the line against disgusting exploitation. In other cases, they exist to give adults who have been poorly taught some sort of guideline and standard.

  33. And you ignored my question about the death penalty why?

    In any case, if you want to pose me a question, can you make applicable to reality? The situation you describe (being only able to trust dems or reps ) is not part of reality.

    someone has gone far down an irrational lane…

  34. *Sigh*

    No one has to share anyone else’s beliefs. This is the true basis of Freedom of Religion. However, if we cannot agree on some fairly minimal standards, we’re doomed. Among those has to be the security of property, and the safety of children. Both are being severely undermined.

    If you cannot understand that, and want to make this about “beliefs” rather than laws and standards, you are in the wrong place.

  35. A big problem today is that there are millions of people who have fallen for the lie that if someone doesn’t choose a sexual desire in their minds, then they must have been born with it.

    I can’t think of anything more ignorant, more stupid, more 19th century Eugenics, and yet it’s huge in governing the way many people think about homosexuality today. And it’s not just liberals, many conservatives are naively lost and believe in this nonsense. As a consequence, they think homosexuality must be a) unchangeable, b) un-resolvable, c) like race.

    If it’s inborn, then it cannot be subject to morality or responsibility.

    “Anything goes” is therefore only justified, otherwise it’s a repression of “nature.”

    A society of idiots. And perverted ones at that.

  36. Why are we surprised they seem to take Roman at least from 1;22 as an instruction manual, rather than a warning;

  38. Mr. McCain, I agree with you on Kaitlyn Hunt, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you in this latest post. There should be absolutely no law in place that enforces a religious (including Christian) view. We were founded as, and, in fact, are, a secular republic, and not a Christian theocracy. The early American years may have been pervaded with Puritanical ideals, but things have drastically changed since then, and will continue to change. However, I sorely doubt that people are clamoring for America to become a Christian theocracy any time soon.

    As for the sodomy thing, note that that started to be overturned and changed in the 1950’s and 1960’s. From what I can recall, it involves privacy laws; besides, who is one to tell someone else what he or she can or cannot do within the comfort of their own home, their private property? If they wish to have anal sex, that is their decision, and they have to live with the consequences. Yet to demonize someone who does such – or rather, you think who does such – simply due to one’s own Christian views, is to not only forsake one’s own Christian teaching [not to judge others], but to violate one’s privacy and a right to it.

  39. The things you describe as “evil” are from a 2,000+ year old book, written by various Hebrew men over centuries, who claim to have been inspired by God. Yet we have no proof to believe such, except the word of believers. Today, polls indicate that 98% of Americans have had premarital sex; about 10% identify as homosexual or of other sexuality; and scientific studies indicate that no one quite fits in the black and white box of “gay or straight”. About 98% of Catholic women of childbearing age who have had sex have used some form of birth control, against the Church’s teachings. Therefore, that evidence would suggest that most Americans do not follow the “moral teachings” of the Bible.

  40. In the not too distant future, you might feel differently about the need for institutional Christianity when your ox is being gored by people with no moral standards. “The end justifies the means” gets ugly very quickly.

  41. There is very well documented evidence of mental illness correlating with a propensity for sodomy.

    It certainly seems to be a bug in the genetic code, at least in some cases.

    In other cases it appears to be nothing more than a chosen, destructive lifestyle.

  44. Historically, and what seems to be absent from this discussion, are the laws of nature which have always trumped societal laws and decisions. Those who fight for same sex marriage and abortion “rights” condemn their entire suicidal tribe, in whatever form, to eventual extinction. If you wish to survive as a society you must procreate, value and protect your progeny. It’s not a moral or legal argument. It’s a genetic mandate.

  45. Part of the Regressive’s agenda is to deny, nay hate, the fact that their beloved civilization and all the freedoms that come with it, is a direct result of Christianity. Nothing drives a Regressive wilder than having to deal with truth.

  46. But by shining a light on an inherently destructive lifestyle you not only promote this lifestyle to our nation’s children, you also condemn the individual who manifests homosexual behavior to this destructive lifestyle. That is disingenuous and hateful.

  47. It seems to me that he got demolished, not because *he* is an idiot, but because the voters — and the pundits — who like to think of themselves as conservative keep refusing to let the leftists do their thinking for them.

  48. Do you consider the ten commandments of no value because they are based on Biblical pronouncements?

    If so then you’re being foolishly myopic.

  49. One thing to keep in mind, every tyrant has tried to do away with religion or has coopted the religion for it’s own purposes. They never succeed.

    In the long run people can sense the emptiness and find that turning to God thru religion fills that emptiness and nothing government or religions deniers can do will change that fact.

    It’s why they’re so hysterical about the degree of faith that still exists. (though it’s at a very low ebb in many places.)

    If it wasn’t a threat, they wouldn’t be worried about it.

Comments are closed.