The Slope Gets Slipperier

They said that Roe v. Wade would not lead to abortion on demand - they were wrong. They said that no-fault divorce wouldn't lead to higher divorce rates, rampant "co-habitation" outside of marriage, and illegitimacy - they were wrong. They said that rampant "co-habitation" wouldn't lead to legal recognition of homosexual "marriage" - they were wrong.

Yeah, that's former Senator Zell Miller's rhetorical gimmick. Hope he doesn't mind my borrowing it. But never let it be said that I don't borrow from the best.

Now, then, it is true that sodomarriage hasn't yet been widely established here in America, but it has north of the border. Logically you would predict that the next step would be a movement to extend legal recognition to bigamists and polygamists, right? "Don't be ridiculous," they say, "that will never happen."

Wanna bet?

A new study for the federal Justice Department says Canada should get rid of its law banning polygamy, and change other legislation to help women and children living in such multiple-spouse relationships.

“Criminalization does not address the harms associated with valid foreign polygamous marriages and plural unions, in particular the harms to women,” says the report, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. “The report therefore recommends that this provision be repealed.”...

Canadian laws should be changed to better accommodate the problems of women in polygamous marriages, providing them clearer spousal support and inheritance rights.

It was, to use a word that makes "them" cringe, inevitable. Just look at the arguments Canadian polygamist "activists" use, and see if they don't sound eerily familiar:

Already, Canadian polygamist activists have taken up the same arguments as gay-marriage advocates did. “Why criminalize the behaviour?” [the study's lead author] said in an interview. “We don't criminalize adultery. In light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society ... why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?”

This ought also highlight the flaw in "socially moderate" arguments like that advanced by the Cap'n:

It would seem that the most prudent option would be the use of domestic partnerships using contract law instead of redefining marriage for the whole of society just to satisfy a fringe element. At least the contracts then govern the outcomes of the failed partnerships, and we don't have to chuck out two millenia of Western culture as our touchstone for human progress.

Perhaps that could work if "paleolibertarians" ("pagans" or "heathen" for short) were reasonable people truly interested in merely carving out their own legal niche and otherwise wanting to be left alone. But "chucking out two [it's actually five, and yes, I'm counting] millenia of Western culture" is precisely what these people want. They seek through political agitation, lawsuits, and civil disobedience an end not dissimilar from what Islamist terrorist networks like al Qaeda pursue via assymetrical warfare, and terrorist regimes like Iran's chase via the acquisition of nuclear weapons: the annihilation of Western culture and its replacement by their own "touchstones for human progress," even though those touchstones spell unequivocal disaster for that purported end.

It is little wonder that our LORD referred to our time as being "like the days of Noah," where, like then, "the wickedness of man was great on Earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." The true wonder will be not even whether we can reascend the slope down which we've slipped so far already, but if we can resist sliding the rest of the way toward the civilizational abyss, and the new dark age that lies beyond.