Many people were rightly horrified this week as Cosmo set out to romanticize incest. The article, “This Is What It’s Like To Fall In Love With Your Brother,” was originally published a little while ago but got renewed attention over the past few days when Cosmo tweeted it.
The piece tells the story of Melissa and Brian, long-lost siblings who connected as adults and began a sexual relationship almost immediately. Brian left his wife to be with his sister. Melissa remains with her husband as she has sex with her brother. The incestuous lovebirds say they have a “connection.” They love each other, and, as we know, love is love is love. They insist that what they’re doing isn’t incest; rather, it’s an expression of something called “Genetic Sexual Attraction.” There is a whole “community” of GSA folks, and, as we’ve learned, once people have organized around a certain form of sexual deviance and called it a “community,” normalization is basically complete.
If GSA sounds familiar, by the way, you may be remembering a story from last year about a mother and son who fell desperately in love after spending most of their lives apart. Or you may be remembering this story about a teenage girl who plans to marry her own father. They all offer the exact same justifications as Melissa and Brian, and Melissa and Brian offer the same justifications that the LGBT camp has been shouting at us for years.
The campaign to normalize incest (sorry, “genetic sexual attraction”) is fully underway. But please don’t call it a slippery slope. There is no slope. Not anymore. We’ve slid down it. The invention of gay “marriage” and the mainstreaming of “transgenderism” were not stops along the slope, preceding things like incest, pedophilia, and polygamy. On the contrary, they were what happened when we got to the bottom. These are not the next frontiers. These frontiers have been traversed; we just didn’t notice it when it happened.
Saying incest is below gay “marriage” on some sort of cultural slope is like saying euthanasia is below abortion. No, abortion is the worst thing. We started with it. Abortion may be more accepted and commonplace than euthanasia, but that’s only because the agents of the Culture of Death leaped over euthanasia in their effort to win the big prize. Now that they’ve won it, it’s no trouble at all to circle back and cover the steps they hurdled along the way. Abortion is less a slope than it is a foundation. Upon it, the death cultists can build the rest of the structure.
The same process is happening in the realm of marriage and sexuality. With gay “marriage,” the Left utterly demolished the marital institution and rebuilt it in the form of some alien thing that the world had never before seen. They established the one rule: if two people (or three, or seven, or whatever) “love each other,” they must be accepted, celebrated, and allowed to “marry.” Marriage has nothing at all to do with procreation, nothing at all to do with family, and nothing at all to do with spiritual covenants before God. That was the ultimate goal. By achieving it, they already achieved incest, polygamy, and pedophilia. The foundation was established for all of that, all at once.
If we were going down a slope in logical fashion and hitting every point along the way, the normalization of incest would have come first, before they won the final prize of perverting and reshaping the most essential human institution of marriage. They jumped that step and went for the Big Thing, just as they did with abortion, but that’s because they don’t need to make the specific case for incest if they successfully make the case to obliterate marriage itself. Clueless conservatives thought they could surrender on marriage and redraw the line somewhere else. “No further!” they shouted like fools, not realizing that by giving up on marriage they gave up on their right to draw any lines anywhere at all. Marriage was the line. It was the last and most important one, anyway. It was the capital city, and we abandoned it to the enemy.
It’s especially absurd, now, when conservatives fret that polygamy may be next. “Hold the line here,” they cry, “we mustn’t let the polygamists in!” Why not? Polygamy is bad but it definitely isn’t as bad as what we already find acceptable in our culture. A polygamous marriage isn’t nearly as unnatural as a homosexual “marriage.” At least a polygamous marriage can still be procreative, and at least there’s some historical precedent for it. Calling gay “marriage” a gateway to polygamy is like calling intravenous heroin a gateway to weed. Let the polygamists join the party, then. Our objections to them make no sense and don’t matter if we’re willing to accept gay “marriage.” Besides, many of us have been practicing polygamy for decades already. We’ve just been doing it successively, divorcing one spouse before finding another and another and another. It is of no consequence whether a man takes five wives at once or one at a time. Arguably, the polygamist is better because he’s honest about what he’s doing.
It’s like if you give your husband permission to have affairs but then react with horror when you find him watching porn. Even if you never specified that porn was also permissible, you nonetheless gave it your blessing when you flung open the doors to infidelity. Porn is part of the affair package, and not the worst part. Whatever logic makes an affair okay certainly covers porn in the bargain. Most women, if they’re going to make the horrendous mistake of loosening the monogamy rules to any extent, would start with permitting porn. Then, when their husband begins having physical affairs, as he is very likely to do, they may accurately say that it was a slippery slope. He slid from the bad thing to the even worse thing. He went from the gateway drug to the heroin needle. But if you allow the even worse thing to start with, you’ve allowed the bad thing whether you explicitly stated it or not. The gateway is far in the rearview.
Here we are, then, recoiling in horror at forms of perversion we implicitly invited into the mainstream several years ago, worrying that a less evil thing may follow behind the more evil thing we’ve already learned to accept. So, what manner of deviancy could actually be called worse than what our culture currently accepts and celebrates? What is actually below our current position on the slope? I don’t know, necrophilia? Bestiality, perhaps? Maybe when people start marrying sex dolls then we can say we’ve truly reached a new low.
Whoops. That’s already happening.
Nowhere to go but up now, I guess. (Please allow me this optimistic delusion).