As the bedtime story tells it, Chicken Little’s unhinged nightmare began with a small piece of falling sky. The hysteria that followed assumed that the rest of the big blue ceiling would come tumbling down any minute. Today, conservatives are ritually accused of inciting a similar panic on issues from abortion to pornography; from immigration to States’ rights; and most recently with gay marriage. Skeptics casually cover us over with Mr. Little’s mantle and call us out for using a Slippery Slope argument. “You’re overreacting!” they exclaim.
The truth is that Progressives on the left are the ones using the Slippery Slope argument to support their agenda and push us down the very slide they say doesn’t exist.
Gay Marriage
Thanks to the California Supremes the big debate of the day revolves around gay marriage. Liberals accuse conservatives of drawing a sinister straight line from homosexuality to Armageddon. Certainly, there are pockets on the right who make this correlation but it’s the exception not the rule.
Most conservatives I hear from are upset about the inch-by-inch ground we give up on traditional values. The end result isn’t a ball of fire; instead we wake up in a foggy, swampy mess of concessions that really does impact society. Conservatives are more than happy to concede gray areas on this graph but not the trajectory.
Frankly, we don’t need to prove a downward slope. The left has done it for us. Take the justification of the New Jersey Supreme Court in their 2006 determination that the State can and should move closer and closer to gay marriage. Indeed, in their minds, it’s just the natural next step.
Follow their downward leading logic in their own words:
• "New Jersey's courts and its Legislature have been at the forefront of combating sexual orientation discrimination and advancing equality of treatment toward gays and lesbians."
• "In 1992, through an amendment to the Law Against Discrimination (LAD), New Jersey became the fifth state to prohibit discrimination on the basis of ‘affectional or sexual orientation.’"
• "In making sexual orientation a protected category, the Legislature committed New Jersey to the goal of eradicating discrimination against gays and lesbians."
• "In 2004, the Legislature added ‘domestic partnership status’ to the categories protected by the LAD."
• "The Legislature, moreover, created the New Jersey Human Relations Council to promote educational programs aimed at reducing bias and bias-related acts, identifying sexual orientation as a protected category."
• "Legislature passed the Domestic Partnership Act, which confers certain benefits and rights on same-sex partners who enter into a partnership under the Act."
• "The Domestic Partnership Act has failed to bridge the inequality gap between committed same-sex couples and married opposite-sex couples."
• "Significantly, the economic and financial inequities that are borne by same-sex domestic partners are also borne by their children."
• "Cast in that light, the issue is not about the transformation of the traditional definition of marriage, but about the unequal dispensation of benefits and privileges to one of two similarly situated classes of people."
“Cast in that light” has quickly become the verse, chorus and bridge for most every liberal libretto. Traditional marriage is bound to fall asunder when you cast it “in that light”. It’s high hypocrisy to claim that the Slipper Slope is a ruse and then utilize it to justify your endgame.
Abortion
Last week the National Institute of Child Health and Development announced a Down Syndrome test for pregnant mothers in their first trimester. The Washington Post quoted Dublin Surgeon Fergal Malone: “By the time you're 20 weeks pregnant, most women will be feeling fetal movement. We wouldn't want to underestimate the psychological or emotional difficulty of undergoing pregnancy termination that late.” Indeed.
The Clintonian mantra of “safe, legal and rare” has now given way to the Clintonian voting motif “early and often.” Of course, there’s also the question of why? Why is it that pro-choice advocates want to rid the world of Down Syndrome children?
Jonah Goldberg recently brought to light the historical relationship between eugenics and Liberal Progressives in his best-selling book Liberal Facism:
“Eugenics fit snugly within this new worldview, for if nations are like bodies, their problems are in some sense akin to diseases, and politics becomes in effect a branch of medicine: the science of maintaining social health. “
In short, if we’re going to get rid of unwanted babies we might as well get rid of the right ones. With these marching orders we finally understand the “why” of first trimester “disease” tests: Liberals know what’s best for all of us.
Conservatives have taken it on the chin for three decades now for suggesting that abortion could lead to soft eugenics. One neat thing about the Slippery Slope though is that it’s easy to document the downward spiral after you’re through the Hegelian water slide. Guess what, we were right.
As Amy Harman reported recently for the New York Times:
“Kirsten Moore, president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line -- even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant. "We all had our own zones of discomfort but still couldn't quite bring ourselves to say, 'Here's the line, firm and clear' because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy," she said. "You can never make that decision for someone else." “
“Choice” is the ultimate subjective grease on the Slippery Slope which brings these contrasts into sharp relief: conservatives employ the Slippery Slope to call out our fall from grace; liberals acknowledge as much but insist we simply sit back, enjoy the ride and make the most of it. Like some bizarre reenactment of a Bugs Bunny “’dis line, no ‘dat line!” routine we find ourselves standing over the cliff with a free fall on our next step.
Pornography
Speaking of rabbits, we can’t seem to escape the omnipresent Playboy brand these days. This last week I shared a park bench with a teenager sporting a baseball cap with the familiar bunny logo. However, unlike its cousin, the drum-beating, ray-ban-wearing Energizer rodent, the consumptive product behind Hefner’s mascot isn’t quite as long lasting or satisfying.
Recent trends indicate that the centerfold playmate should start looking for another job. Professional porn is out; the day of the amateur has arrived. Pornography addicts of a gone-by age had to get their fix via the plastic wrapped glossy at off-hours and discretely hide it from their significant others. Today, the product comes streaming onto the iPhone free of charge while the significant other is watching on or more likely, filming it with you.
To each his own I suppose. Unless of course the “his” in “his own” is your 16-year-old son. In which case you end up with seventeen high-schoolers anxious to Tivo “Nanny 911” for pressing personal reasons. The nexus of technology, amorality and teenage curiosity is wreaking havoc on our children. Amateur porn has become the main sex educator of our kids. Professor James Weaver testified before the Senate in 2006:
“… pornography -- with its seemingly factual, documentary-style presentation of sexual behaviors -- has usurped most other socialization agents to become the de facto sex education for children and adults alike. Thus, the likelihood persists that the main messages of pornography have a stronger influence on the formation of sexual dispositions, including coercive disposition, than alternative forms of sexual indoctrination.”
Never mind this supposed damage. According to Justice Ginsburg and Souter who recently declared in their dissenting opinion in US vs. Williams: “As a general matter pornography lacks the harm to justify prohibiting it.” Visit PornographyStats.com to judge for yourself but I gather most people would at least agree that pornography isn’t fully harm-less. Even staunch feminist Naomi Wolfe senses the impact: “In the end, porn doesn't whet men's appetites—it turns them off the real thing.”
Unlike gay marriage and abortion the Slippery Slope for pornography is not what you expect. Today, sexually explicit material takes its shape in a YouTube clone for bestiality driving societal entropy and numbing the next generation of families to the possibility of true intimacy.
In 2005, NARAL sponsored a host of parties across the country with the cute catch phrase: “Screw abstinence!” That pretty much sums up the Left’s attitude towards conservatives as we stand there with our thumbs in the dike. Our stopgaps are their fodder to stoke the fires and push us down the Slippery Slope. Enjoy the ride!