“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

–Bob Hope

Shortly after the odious Lawrence v. Texas decision in which the US Supreme Court, in a grim foreshadowing of the short shrift it has given the desecration of the concept of marriage, decided to toss a couple of millenia of Western Civilization so no one’s libido would be restrained by law, Rick Santorum gave an interview with Associated Press:

And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

As expected the Lavender Gestapo went after him. Buggery crusader and cheap bully of high school students, Dan Savage, organized a google-bomb of Santorum’s name. Fun was had by all. All the fun, however, has disguised the fact that Santorum was even more right than he could have imagined. An essay titled What It’s Like to Date a Horse in New York Magazine is either the most epic bit of trolling in the history of the world or a sure sign we are in the End Times.

How did you find a sex partner?
One of my friends had access to a nice female pony, and he let me have sex with her. She was a Shetland-cross, and she had dorsal stripes — the black line across the spine — and that’s something that’s turned me on ever since.

What was it like?
My friend was there at the time, and he was holding her head. He didn’t have to do that — it’s not like we were doing things that she wasn’t enjoying — but he was there to protect me. He had his back to me, and he was holding the lead rope to make sure that she was okay and also to prove that I’d actually done it. The sexual experience itself was incredible. To this day it was the best sex I’ve ever had. But in some ways I regret that first time.

In Colonial times, buggering your mare was dangerous business. In the Bay Colony it was a capital offense as 17 year old Benjamin Gourd discovered on April 2, 1674.

Rod Dreher, writing in Galloping Toward Gomorrah, gets the implication exactly right:

One extremely tasteless and morally revolting interview in a leading magazine is not the end of the world. But it is a signpost. It’s not going to make everyone run out and get an animal boyfriend or girlfriend. But it does attempt to weaken an important taboo by giving a sympathetic forum to a deranged man whose behavior deserves the strongest condemnation, and who personally needs help. It’s important to pay attention to this for exactly the reason Robby George says. Ideas have consequences. If your idea is that all consensual sex is good, or at least beyond judgment, and that sexual desire is its own justification, then you have met your consequence in New York‘s anonymous zoophile. If you can stomach reading the thing, it’s rather remarkable how the perv defends himself and his desire using the language and reasoning we have all become familiar with in other contexts.

He quotes Robert George who has addressed the subject on Facebook:

The descent into Gomorrah continues. I believe it can be reversed, but not simply stopped. “This far and no farther,” is not an option. “He who says A, says B.” Once a set of premises is adopted or endorsed, logic carries one to certain conclusions. One may have a subjective wish (rooted in an aversion, or preference, or lack of interest, or whatever) to where the logic of a position takes one, but a wish (or an aversion, or a preference) is not a principle.

Legally, I think it is hard to object to bestiality when the nation’s highest court has ruled that consenting adults are free from state regulation in matters of the crotch. As a man (or woman) already has the authority to, at a whim, send the horse off to be processed into dog food, it is hard to see why they can’t decide to take the horse for a “ride” if the mood strikes.

The duplicitous lefty Damon Linker at The Week (why has he suddenly become a HotAir fav? Anyone have a clue on this?) thinks that Dreher and Robert George have it wrong:

I share some of their concerns. But there are at least two problems with their analysis of the experiment.

First, the trads are wrong to blame the purging of publicly affirmed notions of human flourishing on the spread of relativism. Viewed from inside traditionalist notions of virtue and vice, a culture that seeks to redefine “normal” to include zoophilia might seem like a culture defined by relativism. But it isn’t. Rather, it’s a culture fervently devoted to the moral principle of equal recognition and affirmation — in a word, to an absolute ethic of niceness. Moral condemnation can be mean, and therefore it’s morally wrong — that’s the way growing numbers of Americans think about these issues.

…

And that brings us to the second way in which the trads go wrong — in speaking confidently about how we’re “galloping toward Gomorrah.” This implies that they know exactly where the experiment is going to end up. The truth is that they — and we — have no idea at all. Because there has never been a human society built exclusively on a morality of rights (individual consent) and an ethic of niceness, with no overarching vision of a higher human good to override or compete with it.

This is, quite honestly, the kind of figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin that got us into this mess. I don’t intend to argue “relativism” here, other to point out that to the average reader of English this looks a helluva lot like it and I suspect Linker rejects tying relativism to bestiality because of his own philosophical and political biases. The way we have fetishized “tolerance” and “affirmation” and linked it to sexual perversion guarantees very few are going to like where this trip ends. And if we aren’t headed for Gomorrah, you will certainly be able to see it from where we are bound.

Back to Rick Santorum. When the Supreme Court ruled that a state had no right to regulate sexual behavior, presumably because the same “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Constitution that decided Griswold now protected butt-sex it didn’t take a genius to see where this was going to end but the left and libertarians had to make fun of Santorum because he gave away their game. Now we are here and there is no way to arrest the momentum.

Illustration: Leda and the Swan by Jules Roulleau.