Legalized bestiality? Chains of whorehouses?

In an e-mail exchange in which I was included on the cc line, a leftist wrote to Robert Locke:

We haven’t won on polygamy yet. I think we will in Canada in a matter of years but in the States we’ve only got gay marriage in Massachusetts, Vermont and now California. We need to sit on that for a few years and show that the sky didn’t fall before we go asking for more.

Locke replied:

It is inevitable at this point. Your impatience is a bad habit of your fellow leftists that you should be smarter than. I realize that if you’re itching to marry your gay lover ASAP, it’s hard to patient, but all social trends take time.

I stand by my assertion that we will live to see homosexuality as conservative, i.e. as a moderate and old-fashioned—even classical—form of sexual deviance.

We will live to see new sexes invented, chains of whorehouses like Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a lot more besides.

I was intrigued by Locke’s grotesque though brilliant prediction, and clicked on the link. It is to an article by Locke at FrontPage Magazine in 2001 that I had never read, called “Bestiality and America’s Future.” In it, he argues that given the dynamics of liberalism and the kinds of abnormal sexual practices that liberalism has already normalized, we should expect that bestiality will also be normalized in the not distant future.

In this connection, Locke five years ago bet me dinner for two at any restaurant in Manhattan that marriage to a domestic animal would be legal in at least one state of the Union by 2020. He didn’t say whether the choice of restaurant was up to the winner or the loser of the bet.

Readers should note that it was because of Locke’s position as an editor and contributor at FrontPage Magazine in the early 2000s that FP started to publish traditionalist conservative articles outside the usual range of David Horowitz’s neocon-libertarian ideology. With Locke’s voluntary departure from FP about five years ago, followed by my involuntary departure two years ago (though I didn’t learn about it until one year ago), FP now consists of almost nothing, day in, day out, but one-dimensional neocon hysteria about the campus left and “Islamo-fascists.”

* * *

Just after I drafted the above, this came in from Robert Locke, who says it’s further evidence that I’m going to lose our bet:

Frank Kameny, a hero to the homosexual community who was integral in pressuring the American Psychiatric Association to reclassify same-sex activities as “normal,” has written a letter to a pro-family organization that he believes bestiality is fine, “as long as the animal doesn’t mind.”

In a weekend letter to Americans for Truth, an organization dedicated to revealing the truth about homosexuality, Kameny also said there is no such thing as “sexual perversion.”

“Absolutely indisputably a central part of the very definition of Americanism is the guarantee, found in the Declaration of Independence, as not merely a Right, but as an Inalienable Right, of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” he wrote. “If something which someone arbitrarily defines as a ‘sexual perversion’ provides happiness for consenting adult participants, then its enjoyment is enshrined in basic Americanism.

“So: Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions, by whatever definition, by more and more consenting adults. We will all be the better off thereby. And that will be Americanism in action,” he said.

I asked Mr. Locke:

But who gets to choose the restaurant, the winner or the loser?

He replied:

The winner, of course.

- end of initial entry -

Mark B. writes:

Whoever picks the restaurant, plan on vegetarian because by 2020 … well, you know.

Kristor writes:

I went over to FP to read Locke’s article, and the ad of the minute over on the right side of the page was for that rococo variation on the Classical Deviance, gay chubby dating. I am not making this up. .

Shrewsbury writes:

“In this connection, Locke five years ago bet me dinner for two at any restaurant in Manhattan that marriage to a domestic animal would be legal in at least one state of the Union by 2020.”

This is sheer bigotry. What about non-domestic animals? Does one have to be a servile house-animal to be granted equality? Should a crocodile who happens to fall in love with a man or a woman be denied his human righ…er…well, you know what I mean. We have to work on the nomenclature. No justice, no peace.

And what of the lonely wildebeest?

LA replies:

Kristor wrote:

“… and the ad of the minute over on the right side of the page was for that rococo variation on the Classical Deviance, gay chubby dating.”

Existence is mental. Literally five minutes before I received Kristor’s e-mail I was browsing through Robert Novak’s memoir, The Prince of Darkness, filled with all kinds of fascinating inside information from Novak’s fifty year career as a Washington reporter, and read this:

The first time I ever really took [Jimmy] Carter seriously for president was a few weeks after I saw him in Eliot Janeway’s limo. I was lunching at San Souci with Alan Baron, one of the truly unique characters I have known in politics.

Alan was a Democratic activist from Sioux City, Iowa, who was very liberal, very Jewish, obese, and a cocaine user and homosexual. (pp. 283-84)

Paul Nachman writes:

RL wrote, “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.”

Well, this was in what Don Feder sent out yesterday:

And—from those wonderful folks who brought you drug legalization, euthanasia and homosexual marriage—comes the news that this summer gay sex will be legal in Amsterdam’s historic Vondelpark. Dog-owners can be fined for not having their pets on a leash, but homosexuals can now engage in public acts of sodomy in the heart of Amsterdam.

I’ll assume Feder is reporting actual facts.

Also, there’s a saying “Anything not forbidden is mandatory,” which I’ve seen attributed to physicist Murray Gell-Mann or, alternately, to Richard Feynman (both being Nobel laureates). In context, it applied to physics, but the Locke article suggests its wider relevance.

James M2 writes (June 8):

If the gay movement was 40 years behind where it is presently, would straight men save video clips of homosexual acts on their cell phones for the purpose shocking their buddies? No. They wouldn’t do that because straight guys generally consider homosexual acts to be disgusting. So why is it that I have involuntarily seen multiple acts of bestiality, on cell phone screens shoved in my face without warning? Mere pranksterism would be proffered as an excuse but the perpetrators must be titillated by this stuff.

I hope I’m working with a really bad sample, but it seems like some large number of white-collar office dwelling regular-Joe-seeming guys are walking around America with bestiality videos on their cell phones.

LA replies:

Please start from the beginning and explain this to me.

James M2 replies:

It begins with feminism.

The feminizing acculturation of male youth through the public school system and mass media is quite effectively preventing their healthy sexual development. There is now a large population of young men (mostly white, due to the focus of feminism) who have never been exposed to the concept that there are intrinsic mental differences between the sexes which are based upon biology, and furthermore, that women are biologically programmed to respond to apparent masculinity and “maleness”; these poor boys have never been taught how to be men. These milquetoasty foppish boys will say things like “girls only like to date jerks”, not realizing that the girls are responding to the masculinity of the A-hole/wannabe-thug, not his jerkiness, and that masculinity will trump their sensitivity and listening skills every time. Everything they have ever been taught about how to relate to the opposite sex has gotten them nowhere, and they are eternally stuck in the platonic friend-zone. They become frustrated, confused, and then angry.

This frustration, confusion, and constant lack of success with the opposite sex will often become a case of arrested development, to be expressed as ephebophilia in adult life (enter: To Catch A Predator). But the anger, born of this continual frustration and confusion, can become a type of misogyny that is desirous for revenge. So these males, youth and adult, damaged by feminism, now constitute a huge market for pornography which either depicts adolescent girls, or the degradation and humiliation of women, or a combination thereof. Way to go, feminism!

Now here’s where I’m going with this:

I believe that this considerable demand in the world of porn for any and all types of humiliation and degradation of women (which is frightening in and of itself) is going to act as a door through which the “bestiality scene” can walk. Human / animal sex in and of itself may not appeal to a lot of these guys initially, but the idea of a woman lowering herself to such an act in order to afford her drug addiction may. The point is, a large number of people will get used to seeing this stuff. Even if they don’t actually like it, the fact that they become desensitized to it to the point that they will put it on their cell phones to gross out their co-workers… Well, I’m afraid that’s a small step towards normalization.

Since this is such an uncomfortable topic I really hesitated to write about it, but I do believe that the trends of sexual expression which first show up on the underside of the Internet and in other “underground” environments are often-times important cultural markers that can warn us of things we may soon see in the wider society. So as with many other topics that you explore on your site, I think it’s important to talk about this stuff even if it is unpleasant.

(See continuation of exchange with James M2 in the entry, “The challenge of our time.”)

Philip P. writes (June 10):

JamesM2 got me thinking about about feminization of men and male culture in general. Particularly in the white middle and upper classes, the phenomenon is obvious. My siblings and I were born many years apart. My youngest brother is more than a decade my junior. When I come home to visit, I’m simply shocked by the discrepancy between how he and I were raised.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed concerns the application of corporal punishment. I doubt if my brother has been physically disciplined more than half a dozen times, and then it’s only been a swat on the bottom. A few months ago the subject came up over dinner. My parents just sort of shrugged when I pointed out the difference. “Times change,” my mom said flatly. (My brother just smiled mischievously.)

I, on the other hand, was good friends with the wooden spoon, the belt, and the soap for all my childhood. It only stopped when, around the time I had my first shave, I straightened up after a little dust-up and said, “I’m too old for this now. I won’t take it any more.” And that was that. Damn if that wasn’t a proud moment! I still smile when I think of it today all these years later. In a very significant put hard to pin down way, that was a defining moment, the beginning of my manhood.

Now I should note that my parents weren’t abusive. Not in the least! They were and are loving guardians and teachers whom I love and deeply admire. But I can’t help but think that they’re doing my brother a disservice by going so soft on him (he claims that they rarely even give him “time out”). I really believe it’s going to give him a prissy air, not getting whacked now and again. I can see maybe not physically disciplining a girl (though both my sisters definitely were), but a boy? What’ll put the respect in him? What’ll take the fear of confrontation out of him? What’ll thicken his skin, toughen his hide? What’ll prompt him to assert himself? I don’t know. It worries me, really.

Maybe I’m exaggerating and being melodramatic, but for me, the difference between how he and I were raised in that respect speaks volumes about the state and direction of our society. And I know this: if it isn’t illegal in the future (which it probably will be), I’ll spank my boys when they get out of line, no doubt about it. A lot of old time advice is off, but “spare the rod, spoil the child” sure isn’t.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 04, 2008 08:55 PM | Send