Donkey Sex, Penguin Lust, Nun Beating: the March of The ICK factor

Opus: Pen­guin lust is not Immoral and Wicked and any­one who says so is an old prude. It’s beau­ti­ful and nat­ural, and I for one fully sup­port pen­guin lust.

Phil Dono­hue: That’s great, caller, but today’s topic is “Nun Beating.”

Opus: Good Lord, man, I can’t sup­port that!

Bloom County

One of the first pieces long pieces I wrote as a blog­ger was a cri­tique of Gay Mar­riage and Richard Cohen attack on Rick War­ren:

I will go as far as to say that it would have been an impos­si­bil­ity to have a cler­gy­man who pub­licly SUP­PORTED gay mar­riage give the invo­ca­tion before the year 2000 and in 2004 if John Kerry had won it would have been an incred­i­bly con­tro­ver­sial decision.

But 8 years later the word “bigot” is thrown around at all who dare say otherwise.

3 years later came this story from the daily caller

If a small group of psy­chi­a­trists and other men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als have their way at a con­fer­ence this week, pedophiles them­selves could play a role in remov­ing pedophilia from the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s bible of men­tal ill­nesses — the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (DSM)

and I asked this ques­tion:

My point? I’m not sur­prised one bit and nor should any­one who has been pay­ing atten­tion over the last 3 – 4 decades. The ques­tion is will this be the final trig­ger for the lat­est Great Awak­en­ing or in the final decline of American/​Western society?

Four months ago came (and nine months after Rick San­to­rum said it was com­ing came the Polygamy argu­ment out of the Guardian and the mar­riage of three peo­ple:

Why shouldn’t three peo­ple get married?

As three Brazil­ians are legally joined as a ‘thru­ple’ it starts to look illib­eral to insist that mar­riage must be between two people

and I said:

That this is advanced in the Guardian is inter­est­ing, even more inter­est­ing is the com­ments, tons of peo­ple agree­ing after all one does not want to be “Judgmental.”

Now we have this in Salon:

A legal defense of don­key sex
A man accused of feel­ing up a farm ani­mal argues an anti-​bestiality law is uncon­sti­tu­tional. Does he have a point?
By Tracy Clark-​Flory

With apolo­gies to eas­ily offended read­ers, this story brings new mean­ing to the word “jack­ass” but I’ll say this for Tracy Clark-​Flory, she didn’t wait 32 years into her jour­nal­is­tic career to jump on board a move­ment after it became popular.

Lisa Graas is not amused:

It is not Rick San­to­rum who came up with the idea that “gay rights” would lead to the accep­tance of bes­tial­ity. The slip­pery slope of immoral­ity lead­ing to more and more immoral­ity is just a fact of human nature. It sur­prises no one who is edu­cated about human nature in the con­ser­v­a­tive (Aquinas) tra­di­tion that Salon is now defend­ing bes­tial­ity just as it sur­prised no one in the pro-​life move­ment that Jack Kevorkian ended up with his day in the sun in the after­math of Roe v. Wade. Though assisted sui­cide has not taken hold, “pas­sive euthana­sia” is com­mon prac­tice now in hos­pi­tals. The slip­pery slope is real.

That we have reached a point where a major online pub­li­ca­tion feels com­fort­able with this speaks vol­umes, because it tells peo­ple it’s OK to think about it, that there is a legit­i­mate debate. It is the same dynamic as the Gay Mar­riage argu­ment:

I sus­pect beyond the core set of true believ­ers the sup­port is actu­ally very thin. It is what the “enlight­ened” and “right” type of peo­ple sup­port to show how good and tol­er­ant they are. It allows peo­ple to feel good about them­selves with­out actu­ally doing any­thing. It keep them safe from that most dreaded charge of big­otry. In short it is an exer­cise in narcissism.

This prin­ci­ple is going to con­tinue to be used on all types of things that just a few years ago peo­ple would have been ashamed to advance, but it makes sense. After all it’s a lot eas­ier to re-​define what is accept­able behav­ior than actu­ally chang­ing behav­ior your behavior.

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. It is par­tic­u­larly galling when gay peo­ple are sub­ject to state spon­sored mur­der in places like Iran and ick is invoked beside Islam.

And once the ICK fac­tor moves the def­i­n­i­tion of accept­able will move as well and then Opus the Pen­guin will find his oppo­si­tion to “Nun Beat­ing” doesn’t makes him a prude, it will make him a bigot.

It takes courage to stand up to this, I sus­pect that is why the left con­sid­ers faith­ful Chris­tian­ity in gen­eral and faith­ful Catholi­cism in par­tic­u­lar its great­est obsta­cle and enemy. For it pro­vides to the courage to stand up and say “Enough!”