Bestiality and America's Future

ONE OF THE BIGGEST SHORTCOMINGS of the conservative mind is that conservatives generally have moderate intellectual temperaments and therefore don't really grasp the radicalism of the opposition. When the opposition says something that would be absurd if taken to its logical conclusion, we tend to assume that they won't take it there, simply because we wouldn't if we were in their position. Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue of sexual mores. I must caution the reader that the content of this article is shocking and absurd, (not to mention unsuitable for children) but I regrettably cannot say that it isn't probably true. Because if current trends are allowed to continue, we are in for a wild ride below the belt. All the predictions below are straightforward extrapolations of trends current since the sexual revolution. If anyone has a good argument why they should be expected to stop, I'd very much like to hear it.

For a start, the eventual mainstreaming of pornography goes without saying. Hard-core pornographic TV shows will be as common as sitcoms on prime-time TV. Already there is a store in LA that aims to take porn out of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks dives and merchandise it in a nice, well-lit, upscale setting like a Pottery Barn, and the owners aim to make it a national chain one day, with one in every mall. I'd give that ten years, fifteen tops. The web has certainly done its bit to normalize porn, as the VCR once did. The key thing about it is that it takes away shock value and desensitizes people to everything else.

Most readers will have realized by now that pedophilia is gradually becoming respectable. This is partly a consequence of the liquidation of the separate concepts of childhood and adulthood. If we expect to see 50-year olds prancing on stage at rock concerts like teenagers, and if we try 13-year-olds as adults for murder, how can we really maintain the validity of the statutory rape laws, for example? These are clearly going to be repealed in a few years. A walk through the local mall will reveal that the fashions for girls too young to possess the basic physical attributes of womanhood are based on adult notions of sexiness. They are now being tacitly encouraged by marketing campaigns like boycrazy.com to be sexually active. Obviously all the money selling sex to adults already having been made, children are the next commercial frontier. Look for the marketing of contraceptives to the under-15's next, which will make parents downright nostalgic for Joe Camel.

When it comes to sex, the real cultural battle with liberalism isn't over what is good or bad, it is over what is normal. No one can defend these things as positive goods. The argument that they are normal, however, also forces us to accept them, and is a much more slippery thing to argue because normal is, in the end, whatever people can get away with, which can be changed. This is why giving the opposition an inch necessarily results in their taking a mile, and why people are wrong to suppose that their demands are finite.

So far, so bad. But the real shocker in store is that eventually bestiality will become not just normal, but a core tenet of liberalism. Read that sentence again. I mean it. They have, after all, inexorably repealed every other sexual taboo one by one. To prove this is no joke, here's a passage from a recent article on the website Nerve.com by Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton's Center for Human Values:

The potential violence of the orangutan's come-on may have been disturbing, but the fact that it was an orangutan making the advances was not. That may be because Galdikas understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.

This is not a marginal figure, by the way; this is a professor at Princeton whose ideas are spreading widely in the respectable academic circuit. The problem with his argument is that it is impeccably logical if you accept the premise that there is no fundamental dividing line between man and animals. And if one swallows evolution whole-hog, it sure looks that way, doesn't it? Those anti-Darwinist hicks may be right after all, at least with respect to the consequences of believing in evolution.

One can easily imagine bestiality becoming downright fashionable among cutting-edge trend-followers. The fact that it might remain taboo in Middle America for a few more years will only make it more exciting. The fashion will begin with radical animal-rights activists who take seriously the idea that "specism" is a sin. They will proclaim that only through intimate relations with animals can man really become one with nature. (I am assuming they haven't done this already.) They will pause for a moment to debate the issue of consent on the part of dumb beasts. A code of ethics will be drawn up defining what constitutes sexual harassment species-by-species. Organizations will be formed, with web sites and 501(c)3 tax exemptions, to further these practices. Conventions will be held, in the same respectable hotels where Rotarians gather, to celebrate this pagan bacchanal. Scholarly essays will be written and the merits of different animals and techniques for enjoying them will be debated. Certain breeds of animal will become very expensive and prized, even status symbols. Glossy lifestyle magazines will do features, with pictures of famous people and their pets (sorry, "animal companions.") Respectable politicians will court their votes. Eventually, building on the pathbreaking example of gays, will come the demand for interspecies marriage, "to reverse man's false and arrogant alienation from the rest of the animal kingdom."

If you think this won't happen, who or what is going to stop it? I hope the reader isn't so doubled over with laughter or paralyzed with disgust that he can't be objective. Trends, not resisted, naturally continue until they reach their logical conclusions. Nobody is effectively resisting. QED. This all suggests a key logical principle that we should attend to whenever discussing political or moral issues. When confronted with any argument, ask, "would this argument also prove it is a good thing for people to be allowed to have sex with goats?" If so, the argument is at least somewhat questionable.

The next item in the category of things people won't take seriously because they're so utterly weird is transsexualism. Surgical sex-changes are apparently booming in this country. They already have a lobbying organization in Washington, the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (www.ntac.org). Next will obviously come a caucus in the Democratic Party. (The Republican party will of course opt for the worst of both worlds: it will condemn them enough to lose their votes while engaging in enough politically-correct groveling to lose the policy argument and legitimate people who want to call us bigots.)

You can laugh, but the first transsexual has already run for Congress, one Karen Kerin, Republican of Vermont (www.kerin2000.org). One has to assume that we are in for a long line of firsts: first transsexual governor, first transsexual movie star, and then of course our first transsexual president. If this is also our first woman president, some hardcore feminists will doubtless be unsatisfied. Whether transsexuals count towards sex quotas will doubtless become a key issue, on which the Supreme Court will eventually rule. There may even be hope for the WNBA.

One moral problem is that the resources of traditionalism are taxed in opposing things that simply weren't thought of. There's a saying, "I'll be worried when they think of a new sin," but it looks like this is happening. The most popular singer in Israel is a transsexual called Dana International (check out that creepy globalism of her stage name! Are all these things connected or what?) Naturally, the orthodox rabbis over there didn't like this one bit, but they had a hard time finding an explicit condemnation of the phenomenon in the Old Testament. I think they did find some solid arguments in the end to prove that Yahweh doesn't approve, but the point is, if things get much weirder, they may not find any next time.

Anyway, I predict that what happens next is that some jurisdiction, somewhere in the world, will eventually announce that "the right to the gender of one's choice" is a fundamental human right. Currently, San Francisco and some European countries provide sex changes at government expense; this is clearly the wave of the future. The sexual left will obviously take the position that it isn't fair that one is simply born into the sex one is born into without being asked. They will claim that true freedom means the right to have this changed on demand. Eventually, this position will be referred to as "pro-choice" and assimilated to the other position by this name. There will be a march on Washington, et cetera et cetera.

Naturally, this raises the question of what if one wants something that falls outside the usual biological spectrum? Why be content with just man or woman? Without wanting to shock the reader unduly, it should be pointed out that certain, er, variations on normal human biology are apparently becoming popular, at least judging by what washes up on the newsstands of NY, where these things are displayed openly. The key problem here is, where do they stop? Once they decide to create forms outside nature, is there any limit to what they can come up with? Simply playing with the permutations of male and female is obviously only a beginning: if you can have whatever you want, why take male and female as a limit? Why not create entire new sexes? Once you have genetic engineering and cloning, you can do whatever you want. Naturally, these neosexes (Oxford English Dictionary, I coined the term!) will have rights, political organization, and a victimology all their own. Eventually, they will be declared eligible for affirmative action. Architects will go crazy fitting not two, but three, four, and more toilets into every public building.

Almost makes you nostalgic for good old-fashioned homosexuals, doesn't it? Who the hell thought that one day they'd appear as the traditionalists of the sexual spectrum? Homosexuality in the future will of course be utterly routine. I'd expect the first openly gay president by about 2020. His partner will be called the first gentleman. The military will of course one day follow the example of Alexander the Great, who put all his gay soldiers in one famous unit. A gay Pope is probably a bit further off, but there will surely be a gay Archbishop of Canterbury to show the way. There will be a constitutional crisis in England when the adopted child of a gay union in Buckingham Palace tries to inherit the throne.

Prostitution will go mainstream. There will be national chains of houses of ill repute, with different chains offering different price ranges and different "product." There will be brand names, with national advertising campaigns and carefully-crafted images honed in expensive TV commercials. It will become a respectable profession, leading to the establishment of pre-whore as a major at community colleges and vocational high schools. They will form labor unions, be recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, and go on strike over pay and working conditions. Imagine the things they'll negotiate over! In certain states, it will be illegal to be one without a union card. It is uncertain which level of government will regulate them, but since everything has to be regulated these days, if the Feds take up this responsibility there will be a smallish Sexual Surrogacy Supervisory Agency (SSSA) ensconced in one of those beautiful old Victorian mansions of DC that were once houses of you-know-what in the gilded age. The staff will be a mixture of Camille Paglia wannabes, feminist ideologues, and former madams who have sold out their establishments to one of the big chains.

But in time, even this will seem quaint. I mean, the stuffy Victorian notion of privacy and discretion implicit in it all! If we run the trends forward a few more years, people will just do their thing in public parks. In fact, they will do it everywhere. In corporate offices. At the movies. In the supermarket. On the floor of the Senate. And why not? If it doesn't affect you, what right do you have to impose your moral standards on other people? Plus, you're interfering with a free market and this country was founded on liberty, dontcha know? And shouldn't we be honest about things, rather than hiding them? If this means an X-rated C-SPAN, so what? (Perhaps the only serious drawback is that it could complicate our relations with sexually conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and undermine the Middle East peace process. The State Department won't like it.)

Don't want to go there? Well, if we want to stop this, we'd better start working now to turn around the trend towards ever-looser sexual mores. We had one shot with AIDS, but it turned out that the cultural dynamic was stronger than the prudential one. The important thing to grasp is that whenever we are asked to concede yet another point, like tacitly legalizing prostitution in the form of "escort" services, we are not just agreeing to the thing in question. We are agreeing to the furtherance of a mass trend that will inexorably lead to all the things mentioned above. We need to use the shock value of these things (while it lasts, which may not be long) to wake people up. Then we need to roll back what can be rolled back.

We must bring back old-fashioned vice-squad crackdowns on prostitution, however upscale. We need to use the logic of protecting children to seriously suppress pornography to the greatest extent compatible with not turning it into a black-market commodity. We must tax porn to make it unprofitable. We must ban sex-ed in public schools, where it has become a propaganda service for the normalization of perversion and an assault on parental responsibility. We must restore the stigma of unwed motherhood and fatherhood. Transsexualism should be banned except in cases of sex-chromosome abnormality. Hate crime laws giving crimes against homosexuals a higher status than equivalent crimes against other people must be repealed.

I really should have posted this back in 2001. Fortunately, Lawrence Auster brought this back to my attention.

Personally, I think that any article ending with "For the sake of the sheep, we must.: should never be mentioned in the same sentence article as going to a restaurant.

This is the dumbest article I have ever read on FR. You have got to be kidding me. It makes a few valid points at the beginning, but it just turns into the biggest load of garbage these eyes have seen in many, many months.

Bestiality is tame, man. I mean, our future President, B. Hussein Obama, can see dead war heroes out in the audience, and his recent speech indicates when we’re long dead too, we can still look back and recall the glorious day of his coming, when the sea receded and everybody got free health care. So I say real progressives should, like, fight for full liberation of necrophiliacs, you know? Bring people of all races, genders, sexual preferences and state of decomposition together in Hope.

As the then-mayor of New Orleans, Martin Behrman, said when the city was forced to close Storyville, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”

You'd better get your head out of whatever. There is absolutely nothing that a leftist won't consider. Nothing!

And make no mistake - all you have to do is look at all the Big Tent simpletons and see that anything goes is also coming to a GOP near you. Who in their right minds would ever at one time have thought they'd see the GOP pander to illegal aliens and perverts and Greenfece types? But there it is, right in your face, and they're unashamed.

Leftists conceive of it, and the GOP grovels for it. Those are the facts of Life.

Fair enough, but BEASTIALITY? You can’t be serious...

I recall reading an article on FR that described bordellos in Sweden that catered to such appetites.

Time to jiggle the handle, this world is about to go swirly...

"You'd better get your head out of whatever. There is absolutely nothing that a leftist won't consider. Nothing."

I agree. In sexual matters, liberals cannot accept any boundaries and still be liberals. As long as the activity is not hurting anyone, as long as it is consensual by liberal logic, it ought to be permitted. How can liberals say there is something immoral about beastiality without being judgemental? My dad said years ago when same sex marriage was first being talked that people marrying dolphins would be next.

Nothing shocks me anymore. I am sometimes glad I am in the last third of my life because at the rate things are going I dread to think of what it will be like in 25 or 30 years.

You're displaying the mindset described in the first paragraph...

America is not just an economy.

America is defined by a system of values, the most important of which are:

1. Government knows its place.
2. If government gets uppity and out of its place, it is to be slapped down.

Nothing shocks me anymore.

Me either. Got numbed years ago. You wake up to stuff like this, and know that Life is holding out less and less promise.

Now they want to tinker with our very DNA because of something that doesn't exist. Anyone who thinks that there's nothing the left won't do is an utter fool.

Take me Home!

There is absolutely nothing that a leftist won't consider.

And the more it upsets moderates, conservatives and Christians, the better.

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