A New York Times op-ed published shortly after the Supreme Court’s same-sex decision said that the court’s logic could eventually lead to recognition of polygamy or plural marriages, an argument also made by Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissenting opinion. This slippery-slope argument has also been used to contend that the court’s decision will open the door to legal recognition of bestiality or incest.

Robot-human marriages might be next on the list. Probably not soon, admittedly, but it nevertheless will be an inevitable part of our future. Indeed, some critics of same-sex marriage, including some conservative Christian opponents of gay marriage, have argued that the court’s recognition of same-sex marriage would inevitably lead to robotic-human marriages. There has recently been a burst of cogent accounts of human-robot sex and love in popular culture: Her and Ex Machina, the AMC drama series Humans, and the novel Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. These fictional accounts of human-robot romantic relationships follow David Levy’s compelling, even if reluctant, argument for the inevitability of human-robot love and sex in his 2007 work Love and Sex With Robots. If you don’t think human-robot sex and love will be a growing reality of the future, read Levy’s book, and you will be convinced.

However, this does not surprise me in the least. I expect something like this from Slate, to be honest, and I was really thinking something like this was bound to come sooner. What disturbed me deeply was Slate’s apparent dislike of civil rights and their complete ignorance of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here is part of the end of the column:

Robot-human marriage is not about robot rights; it is about the right of a human to choose to marry a robot. While few people would understand or support robot-human intimacy today, as robots get more sophisticated and humanlike, more and more people will find love, happiness, and intimacy in the arms of a machine. Robot sex and love is coming, and robot-human marriage will likely not be far behind.

How utterly vile of the folks at Slate to apparently endorse completely violating the rights of robots by insisting they don’t have a say in who they marry. This is the kind of thinking that hurts the movement to recognize equal rights for all. Did the writer learn nothing from Lt. Commander Data’s fight to be declared his own person and not property? I hope that history will prove this writer is far too closed-minded for the era in which he predicts is coming.

P.S. I hope you’ll excuse the silliness of this post. Things have been a bit too serious around these parts, and I firmly believe in the necessity of the Happy Warrior mentality.