Slippery slopes

When Rick Warren read his prayer at President Obama’s inauguration, the hairs on the necks of several million gay people stood erect. After all, it was Warren who, many said, equated homosexuality with polygamy and pedophilia.
Conservatives agree with Warren—such as Mike Huckabee, who forecasted that allowing gay marriage would lead to matrimony between “man and animal,” and James Dobson, who openly worried that gay nuptials could lead to “marriage between a father and a daughter.”

The list goes on—the Hannitys, the Robertsons, the Santorums—all of them citing some or all of the Big Four conjugal taboos: polygamy, pedophilia, bestiality and incest, or, for lack of a better word, polypedobestincestialism.

First of all, let’s set the record straight: For all their 12th-century, homophobic viewpoints, Warren and friends are not equating homosexuality with polypedobestinsexuality. They are simply employing a slippery-slope argument. For instance, if you were to say that marijuana could lead to heroin, you are not saying that marijuana is as bad as heroin, only that it could lead to it. Warren and friends are absolutely correct: If we allow gays to hitch, what’s to keep the bigamincestamists of the land from arguing for their marital rights, as well? If you open the door for one group, why shouldn’t it stay open for the rest? In this way, I find myself in reluctant agreement with medieval homophobes. Where we disagree is that, instead of locking gay marriage out, I believe we should let every other marriage in—pedophilic wedlock excepted, of course, because children cannot consent to sex with adults, but as for the rest—whatever tickles your testicles, people.

Let’s examine individually:

Bigamy / polygamy: This is a no-brainer. Yes, duh, of course, we should incarcerate that fundamentalist, compound cultist scumbag who collects 14-year-old slave-brides and forces them to spend the remainder of their childhoods lying beneath his saggy, hairy, middle-aged abdomen as he statutorily rapes the souls right out of them night after night. In my perfect world, that guy would spend the rest of his life in Leavenworth as the seventh wife and cellmate of Krusher, the 400-pound, serial-killing, cross-dressing Wizard of the Aryan Nation. As for the rest of the consenting-adult, polygamist population, whatever bubbles your hot tub, folks.

Bestiality: If some guy wants to put a ring on his cocker spaniel’s paw, what’s the problem? For all we know, the guy has been screwed over by human women all his life. Maybe dogs are the only people with whom he can relate. Maybe that cocker spaniel is exactly whom he wants visiting him in the hospital should he ever get beat down by a roving gang of zoo-bashers. I know many have argued that animals do not have the capacity to consent to interspecies intimacy. I have to laugh at that. Coming from a society that has the flesh of a trillion slaughtered farm animals wedged in the crannies of its collective teeth, your outrage over the occasional shotgun dog marriage under-whelms me.

Besides, these creatures can consent to manimal sex. Has your cat ever rubbed its ass in your face while purring suggestively? Ever been leg-humped by a dog before? Me? I’ve been leg-humped more times than any person I know. I may not be all that attractive to humans, but in the LGBT community (Labradors, Greyhounds, Beagles and Terriers) I’m considered to be one hot bitch.

Incest: Not every incestuous relationship is of a pedophilic nature. Sometimes they are actual consenting adults who, for some reason, have fallen in love. Whatever. It’s not my business. I know most people think this is a bizarre position to hold. Sorry, but I just do not care—I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care—I do not fucking care how perverse is anyone’s sex life. I do not care how many people try to convince me that some people are too revolting or aberrant to receive the same rights as the rest. That’s what they said about homosexuality 20 years ago. I’m glad I didn’t listen to them, either.

These people, these “degenerates,” they didn’t choose to be who they are. I hate to regurgitate a cliché, but, there but for the grace of God, right? So, why do we always try to govern whom other people are allowed to love? Is it fear? Do we believe there will be a sudden international wave of brother-sister couplings? Are we concerned that everyone will go running out to acquire multiple spouses? Has everyone forgotten how hard it is to have even one spouse?

All the aforementioned perversities are subscribed to by a tiny minority of the population. The rest of us are too repulsed to even think of going there. That’s the reason for the recoil. That is also the reason why they represent no danger to us. There is no possibility of propagating a man-dog race. The gene pool will be just fine. Conventional marriage is not threatened by any of these unions. The only thing that will change in America—if we had the heart and the balls to sanction bestincestolygamy—is that a few thousand people may legally pursue their own peculiar brand of joy, and we will move one step closer to being the sort of people who actually mean it when we say that everyone, not just the so-called “normals,” may have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of sexy funky donkey love, er, I mean happiness.    

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