The logical result of 50 years of secularism

On a non-​religious level it seems to me you can not ratio­nally say that gay mar­riage is ok and should be legal with­out also allow­ing either polygamy and incest between con­sent­ing adults. Both have a longer and more accepted cul­tural his­tory worldwide.

And PLEASE don’t give me the “ick” fac­tor argu­ment about these other things being accepted. Ick is just an argu­ment about cul­ture. It is the same argu­ment that one would have heard con­cern­ing gay mar­riage less that 20 years ago.

DaT­e­chGuy: Dec 23^rd 2008 Richard Cohen, Nar­cis­sist or Bigot

That was another lit­tle goof of mine, shame. I don’t know why I thought we needed shame

George Burns as God. Oh God 1977

With­out God every­thing is permitted

Fyo­dor Dostoevsky

On Fri­day the Star Tri­bune pub­lished a story con­cern­ing a prank at a high school rally that was …“inter­est­ing”:

A prank on some blind­folded Rose­mount High School ath­letes — they were unknow­ingly and at times amorously kissed by their par­ents dur­ing a recent pep fest — is col­lect­ing YouTube views by the tens of thou­sands and has the prin­ci­pal apol­o­giz­ing for what happened.

Here’s how the prac­ti­cal joke, orig­i­nated by school staff mem­bers, played out dur­ing the assem­bly on Dec. 8:

The cap­tains of the school’s win­ter sports teams — boys and girls — were lined up and blind­folded. They were told they would be kissed and then asked to guess who was on the other side of their lips.

Some of the par­ents dur­ing the 59-​second YouTube video are seen hold­ing the kisses for sev­eral sec­onds, cup­ping their child’s faces or embrac­ing and swaying.

Dea­con Greg is nau­se­ated, The Anchoress is shocked.

I’d like to say I’m sur­prised but I’m not. I’ve been pay­ing atten­tion. It’s been just one year since the Swiss started talk­ing the repeal of incest laws. It is only four months since psy­chol­o­gists met in DC to dis­cuss “nor­mal­iz­ing” pedophilia as a men­tal illness.

I think they both missed the most impor­tant line of the piece (all empha­sis mine):

“There is no ques­tion that peo­ple were offended,” Woller­sheim told the Star Tri­bune. “I apol­o­gize to those who were offended, and we won’t do it again.

“Any­thing that hap­pens at this school is the principal’s respon­si­bil­ity. I take full respon­si­bil­ity. … There shouldn’t be an event in a school that we offend peo­ple with.”

Note what is said. He is sorry that peo­ple were offended. Not that it was wrong, not that it was creepy, but that peo­ple were offended.

The impli­ca­tion that if peo­ple were NOT offended it would have been OK.

That more than any­thing else is the take away here, if it wasn’t for those puri­tan­i­cal prudes who were offended this would be no big deal and we could all have our fun.

The above can stand on it’s own but I’m about to make a VERY uncom­fort­able point, if you don’t want to see it then don’t click the con­tinue button

Update: Wouldn’t you know that just as I fin­ish this post I’ve worked hours on to sched­ule for tonight Dar­leen Click uses the Ick Fac­tor line in a great post at Pro­tein Wis­dom!

Update 2: That’s Click not Glick, my bad, thanks Joy.

Update 3: Stacy at Accept­ing Abun­dance links quot­ing applic­a­ble law.
:

I’d like to illus­trate how chang­ing the ICK fac­tor works. The fol­low­ing two screen shots are from a x rated web site:

This is one line of the search results for “mother daughter”

This is from a search for “mother son” from the same site.

Note the num­ber of views on each of these results and con­sider the fol­low­ing: There were over 1000 dif­fer­ent results for both of these searches on this sin­gle web site. I included other “cre­ative” searches I sus­pect that num­bers would have been similar.

Let’s stip­u­late that all of these peo­ple are, no mat­ter what the labels say, in fact paid actors and the rela­tion­ships between the actors are not actu­ally what the labels claim to be. That being the case noth­ing done here is ille­gal. Yet this site, (which is only one of thou­sands) are but a click away if you have any kind of per­sonal inter­net connection.

For­get the pseudo incest men­tioned above, two gen­er­a­tions ago what would be called “nor­mal” porn, had a social oppro­brium, an ICK fac­tor if you will. (At 13 I remem­ber with a pal hav­ing a garbage bag hid­den in the woods with a stash of what was called at the time “dirty” magazines).

Over the last gen­er­a­tion how­ever, porn ha,s to a large degree been main­streamed. It’s reached the point where when two weeks ago on 96.9 FM host Mel Rob­bins was out­raged over a Fox report reveal­ing the Gay Porn past of an area teacher stress­ing that what he did wasn’t illegal.

I found the dis­cus­sion fas­ci­nat­ing. There were no short­age of callers dis­agree­ing with her on this sub­ject but nobody really seemed will­ing to say some­thing was actu­ally wrong.

I sub­mit that this is because the ICK fac­tor has shifted. To the elites and their allies in the media the nor­mal­iza­tion of porn (straight or gay) to high school stu­dents doesn’t cross the ICK fac­tor but to sug­gest let along state such nor­mal­iza­tion of Porn (Gay or Straight) to high school stu­dents is unde­sir­able, that’s beyond the pale.

It’s the same sit­u­a­tion as the rally. Noth­ing that was done at that Pep rally in Min­nesota was ille­gal either, but since it’s still beyond the cur­rent ICK. We need to use the veneer of “offense” to stop it just as if it was a Christ­mas Tree on a town com­mon. No moral judg­ment is allowed.

It’s yet another man­i­fes­ta­tion of what John Nolte has said:

And this is how cin­e­matic pro­pa­ganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s moti­va­tions are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thought­ful peo­ple to start sec­ond guess­ing them­selves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held cap­tive by the pow­er­ful sound and fury of the mov­ing pic­ture. First we’re led to iden­tify and sym­pa­thize with a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter, then that char­ac­ter does some­thing designed to chal­lenge our belief structure.

Such propaganda’s tar­get is not so much sec­u­lar­ists who con­sider these things a mat­ter of taste rather than belief struc­ture. The tar­get is a per­son like me. Porn has always been the sin I’ve strug­gled with and the inter­net age hasn’t made it any eas­ier. If such pro­pa­ganda can’t per­suade me to aban­don my knowl­edge of what is sin and what is not, those push­ing such pro­pa­ganda will be more than happy to cause me to sim­ply shut up for fear of a charge of hypocrisy. Ain’t gonna hap­pen.

This is sim­ply another step in the attempt to change the ICK fac­tor by peo­ple who want to change social norms to jus­tify them­selves. Just nar­cis­sism. What hap­pened in Min­nesota is not part of the fight, it’s sim­ply its log­i­cal result.

I sub­mit that in a gen­er­a­tion, when both all the par­ents and the chil­dren and the teach­ers have had access to the web links I’ve shown above the ICK fac­tor will have shifted and you will have not a prin­ci­pal apol­o­giz­ing for an inces­tual pep rally we will instead have radio hosts exco­ri­at­ing the Star Tri­bune for report­ing on it and call­ing those who object puri­tan­i­cal and intolerant.

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.