During the just past election campaign I was tempted to get into it with a dolt who rejoiced at how glorious it was for him to be able to vote against the ballot measure in California that required the producers of porn to prove men who penetrated people in porn movies shot there wore a condom. The opposition to that work-place safety rule mounted by the porn industry won and now the right of the human immunodeficiency virus, the hepatitis A, B, and C viruses, and other STDs incurable and, in some cases, untreatable, to propagate and flourish without the intervention of reason and morality which might have protected at least some of their host organisms from being infected. Now, doesn't that just warm you right to the bottom of your liberal hearts?
When, very often college-allegedly educated, alleged liberals can fall for the porn industry line on this question, is it any wonder that so many others fell for Trump's line of lies?
There is nothing unknown to anyone with a college education about how sexually transmitted diseases are spread, is there? Even the most ignorant of guys who didn't finish 8th grade know how those are contracted. But using the lines of "free speech" "free press" "freedom of expression" all that goes out the window. Not even that great liberal value of workers protection put a dent in it with the guys who voted for the propagation of HIV and Hepatitis C last week.
This is an example but only one of how liberalism was degraded from its Biblical character of caring for the destitute, the weakest members of human society, and even extending to the humane treatment of animals, to the championing of depravity being free to flourish.
That the one and only area of civil rights to advance in the past two decades was of gay men and lesbians to marry and to be free of restrictions on their right to have sex is illustrative. How my right to marry advanced even as the most basic of other aspects of equality for virtually every other group of the underclass suffered and have been abrogated is certainly worth thinking about very hard. I attribute a lot of that advance to the fact that Lesbians and gay men are often members of the affluent, white privileged class which the legal system caters to. If being Lesbian or gay was restricted to racial minorities and was associated exclusively with the economic underclass, there is no way that the Roberts court would have done what it did, never mind other parts of the government. By the way, there are lots of poor LGBT people, many of whom are Black, Latino and members of other parts of the racial underclass. And, let's not kid ourselves, Black people and Latinos, in general, have been returned to a racial underclass by the Courts, by congress and most of all by state governments around the United States. Being a gay man or Lesbian is still associated with workplace and other discrimination, only it is now covert instead of explicit in those places where it isn't still legal. That fact is that gay men like the sociopathic internet billionaire Peter Thiel are the ones who most benefited from the Supreme Court rulings in this area because they benefit the most from everything our post-democratic, decadent government does.
Thanks to reading the great essays of Marilynne Robinson I can now see a lot more about how liberalism failed so abjectly and I think the most basic reason for that is the turn from the origins of liberalism in the Mosaic laws of economic and social justice for the many to the late 18th century which reduced liberalism into the non-interference of the government into the doings of the elite few, leaving poor people to fend for themselves. 18th century "liberalism" is a system in which the already rich and powerful and intelligent and ruthless could hardly have failed to prosper at the expense of the underclasses that the original liberalism existed to protect and serve. It is no less than the difference between a religiously founded liberalism which serves the many and that which crowned itself as "enlightenment" which ends up serving the powerful few.
There is, certainly, no real difference between that "enlightenment" liberalism and the economic interests that are considered to define conservatism, once conservatism sheds it's old-fashioned practice of sexual prohibition which ours certainly has. Unnoticed by the allegedly religious right, it was the conservatives on the Supreme Court, put there by Republican presidents who have become the greatest champions of porn. The only exception I can think of in recent cases was Alito in the putrid crush porn case and he was an outlier on the entire court. Liberals on the court have, as well, bought into the porn industry enabling rulings. That the right and the oligarchs it serves have turned the "free speech" "free press" "free expression" slogans of 1950s and 60s media lawyers around to enable oligarchs to take the country by peddling lies is no great surprise.
I think we are at a crisis in which liberals will have to decide which side they are on. I don't think liberals who believe liberalism is all about the good of the underclass and protecting life can continue to pretend that the program of the "enlightenment" style liberal isn't incompatible with real liberalism. What so often gets called "liberal" is, in fact an enabling of the elites and their ability to oppress people. The Mosaic Law was, after all, made necessary because of the ability of the elite of that time and of all times to lord it over the weak, the poor, the minority, the oppressed. The Mosaic Law, the Prophetic tradition which cited and developed and applied it to later times and the Gospel of Jesus and his followers which applied it to new areas of the human population are all in opposition to the very ones which the corrupted "liberalism" of today serves. That is the real reason so much of that pseudo-liberalism has religion and, especially, Christianity as its primary object of hate. And, at bottom, it is also the reason that fascists of all kinds have targeted religion as its foe, from fascism and Nazism to Marxism and also the pudding-headed anarchy which would certainly immediately devolve into the rule of the strongest and most ruthless as civil order is destroyed.
And it is so incredibly stupid. I have pointed out how truly clueless the folks of the sciency pseudo-left online and in the magazines, the very ones who decry the anti-vaxxers and opponents of vaccines and other unenlightened enablers of disease and infection turn into the greatest champions of vectors of infection when you throw sex into the mix. Truly, those people are just as stupid but in a different way. They merely add a level of stupidity and hypocrisy on top of that while preening in their scientifically informed enlightenment. As a gay man, since it doesn't seem their imaginations are capacious enough to see AIDS and Hepatitis never enhanced the freedom and liberty of anyone no matter how educated, privileged or rich they were or not. Getting them through sex doesn't make that hard reality go away, enabling it is not a liberal stand though it is stupid enough to be a pose of pseudo-liberalism.
I hate to break it to you, Sparkles, but I have never met a liberal who felt his civil rights were being violated by having Ron Jeremy wear a rubber. Also, most porn is consumed in the red, religious states. Sorry.
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