Or more precisely, a certain dissenting opinion:
“The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable’ . . . the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, ‘furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual’ . . . The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that ‘the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice’ . . . This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.”
One of the problems with slippery-slope arguments is that, when confronted with a demand for radical change, you can never know in advance exactly what the results of some hypothetical “reform” will be. You may have an educated guess that bad things will happen, but the Law of Unintended Consquences always has a way of surprising us, so trying to predict specific outcomes is difficult. And I’m pretty sure that even the most prescient observer did not predict, in June 2003, that we’d so soon see simulated incest as pep-rally entertainment:
[A] recent winter sports pep rally at Rosemount (Minn.) High featured a comedy skit which took advantage of unknowing captains of the various winter varsity squads. After the team captains walked into the gym blindfolded, they were told that they were going to be kissed by a special someone, and then were asked to guess who it was that kissed them. . . .
It turns out that the person who kissed the athletes — in every circumstance — was their own opposite sex parent. While no one has questioned the comedic intentions of the prank, the stunt itself has still drawn plenty of criticism not for the student athletes, but for what the parents did in executing the practical joke. . . . [S]ome of the parents took their roles as “special someones” to a level that left many onlookers feeling uncomfortable and even queasy.
The story says there is video, which I don’t want to see and you probably don’t want to see, either. The normal reaction is:
What the hell is wrong with people? What the hell were these parents thinking? What was the school thinking? Is self-respect a concept utterly lost to this country?
So says the Anchoress, who was linked by Da Tech Guy, citing lots of other things going on nowadays which make normal people wonder the same thing: What the hell is wrong with people?
This rampant insanity — which is, er, waxing rather than waning — Da Tech Guy calls “the logical result of 50 years of secularism,” and I am not disposed to argue much against that conclusion. But why secularism?
What force or forces have led to increased secularism? I would contend that the problem can be summed up in a single word: Equality.
Once you adopt the egalitarian mindset, you view all established order — all traditional hierarchies — as unjust and illegitimate.
Basic categorical distinctions like husband and wife, parent and child, student and teacher, and indeed even man and woman, are delegitimized by the egalitarian worldview. Why, after all, do we find the liberal media so sympathetic with Occupy Wall Street protests against the wealth of the rich? Because it is supposedly “unfair” for one man to have a million dollars while others are deeply in debt.
The traditions of private property and free enterprise are, to the egalitarian mind, as illegitimate as the tradition that marriage is the union of exactly one man and one woman. The pursuit of “social justice” requires that these allegedly arbitrary distinctions be swept away as obsolete and oppressive legacies of the benighted past, so as to usher in an age of Progress and Enlightenment.
Among the elements of the established order which the egalitarians were most determined to destroy was the distinction between God and Man, thus to remove from consideration any deference to Divine Authority. Religion was mocked as unscientific superstition, the Bible subjected to scornful literary criticism, and the clergy exposed as hypocritical.
All of these anti-religious forces have been gathering momentum for far more than the 50 years Da Tech Guy ascribes to the secularist trend. Wasn’t this a basic complaint of Bill Buckley in God and Man at Yale, published in 1951? If eminent authorities at Yale were part of an observable trend six decades ago, certainly that trend had already been developing for many decades even then.
Buckley did not predict — for how could he have possibly imagined? — where that trend would lead, but by the time he sounded the alarm 60 years ago, America was already sliding down the slippery slope. And no sooner had I written that sentence than Smitty sent me this news:
Group sex is the latest trend for
teenagers, says disturbing new report
Average age of first group sex experience
among study participants is just 15.6 years old
A new study has found that one in 13 girls aged 14 to 20 have engaged in ‘multi-person sex’ (MPS).
A total of 328 girls who had visited health clinics in Boston, U.S, took part in the study and 7.3 per cent of them said they had had group sex.
Worryingly, among the girls in that group, 45 per cent said at least one male participant had not used a condom.
[R]esearchers at the Boston University School of Public Health said that the majority of the girls ‘reported being pressured, threatened, coerced, or forced to participate in MPS at least once.’
Although some of those participating in the study were adults, the average age of their first group-sex experience was just 15.6 years old.
A total of 54 per cent of those studied had multi-person sex for the first time when they were younger than 16.
Wonderful: The teenage orgy becomes a common rite of passage. Girls are having group sex even before they reach the legal age of consent. How long before the “emerging awareness” cited by the Supreme Court majority in Lawrence v. Texas emerges far enough to encompass this?
At this point, the safest prediction would be that America’s slide into degeneracy will continue, and we should not be too surprised by what strange things await us as we approach the bottom of that slippery slope, nearing that fabled destination of a road paved with good intention.
