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Friday, January 28, 2022

What'll Be the Next Taboo to Fall?

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s those of a certain age have witnessed one taboo, one traditional moral value after another collapse with astonishing suddenness. Like dominoes, it seems an inevitability that eventually they'll all fall until nothing whatsoever is considered wrong.

Assuming that the dominoes will continue to fall we might ask what will be the next one to pass into the boneyard of historical fossils? Three obvious candidates are to legal constraints against pedophilia, polyamory and bestiality.

The taboo against bestiality will probably survive for a while simply because most people still consider sexual congress with animals to be exceedingly "yucky." Not morally wrong, mind you, just very, very distasteful.

The taboo against pedophilia is a more likely candidate to give way soon because throughout history effete elites have been sexually attracted to children, both of the opposite sex and of the same sex. There are organizations today, like NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, quietly lobbying to make such relationships legal.

The one impediment, however, that still stands in the way of the legalization of pedophilia (and bestiality) - indeed the only impediment in a secular society that has abandoned Judeo-Christian sexual morality - is the child's inability to give informed consent. But consent is actually less an impediment than a speed bump.

After all, the reasoning goes, we don't require a child's consent to get them vaccinated, make them eat their spinach, go to bed at a certain time, do their chores or go to school. Why then should informed consent be a barrier to allowing adults to engage in sexual activity with children?

There is, in a secular society, even less reason to prohibit polyamory, i.e. group marriage, since everyone in the relationship is presumably a consenting adult. In a society that has abandoned any solid basis for assessing moral right and wrong there's certainly no obvious reason to forbid it.

Marriage had traditionally been a union of one man and one woman, but with the Obergefell decision in 2015 legalizing gay marriage, the Supreme Court decided that the sex of the participants in a marriage no longer matters. On what logical ground, then, can we say that the number of participants matters? There simply is none. The only impediments to polyamorous marriages, seem to be practical or legal - matters such as inheritance and property rights, etc. - but these, though they may be complicated, can be worked out just as they are in large families.

So polyamorous marriage may well be the next domino in the row, but there's one other candidate that we might keep on our radar screen.

The next taboo to fall in the left's inexorable march to banish all traditional sexual customs in our culture may well be incestuous marriage. Incest taboos arose to prevent intermarriage because children born to such unions were often deformed or in some way incapacitated.

Modern technology and contraception, however, can obviate this concern so why should society prevent two people who love each from expressing their love just because they may be biologically related to each other? It may be objected that not many people would want to marry their cousin or sibling or certainly not their parent, but all it takes is one couple to appeal their case to the Supreme Court and what grounds would a post-Obergefell Court have for denying them relief?

When a pilot in zero visibility weather disdains his flight instruments, his objective guides, and tries navigating by what feels right to him he may fly straight and level for a few seconds, but very soon vertigo sets in and he ultimately winds up in a death spiral, corkscrewing himself into the earth.

In its hubris, our society has disdained its traditional moral instruments. It's momentum has carried it on for a time, but now we're trying to navigate a lot of issues according to what feels right to us, and we're becoming completely disoriented.

The Obergefell decision opened a Pandora's box, and now we might rightly wonder how long it will be before our entire culture corkscrews itself into the ground.