Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
Americans have been steadily losing rights in every area except the sexual. Freedom of speech and religion are on the decline, but the rights to have other people pay for your birth control and provide a space for your gay wedding are doing well.
Under the Supreme Court's current take on Eminent Domain, your property can be seized and handed over to the New York Times, as a building owner whose building occupied a space that the Times wanted to occupy with its own hideous skyscraper discovered. Under the ObamaCare Mandate, you can be forced to pay money to a third-party company or be fined with a punitive "tax". A Supreme Court Justice suggested that it might be possible to outlaw burning the Koran and Freedom of Religion no longer means that religious institutions can't be forced to violate their beliefs.
Even sexual freedoms are not really expanding, sexual entitlements are. Abortion, despite the latest sweep of hysterical propaganda from a bankrupt political class, isn't going anywhere. And no one, not even the silly people sitting behind scrolling tickers on cable chat shows, seriously think that it is.
The latest achievements in sexual freedom all involve getting other people to pay for it, whether it's birth control entitlements or gay marriage entitlements. The agenda isn't the freedom to do what you please, but the power to make other people affirm your sexual decisions and then pay for them.
Describing this as sexual freedom is a misnomer as it involves taking away the freedom of others, not even for a third-party's freedom, but the comfort level and lifestyle of that third party. These aren't sexual freedoms, they're sexual entitlements.
Civil rights stopped being civil rights decades ago and became civil entitlements, civil privileges allotted to especially deserving groups on account of their official victim status. These civil rights, peculiarly, deprived other people of their freedom and violated the very ethos of equality that had been the basis of the whole fight.
In a tragic turn of events the fight for equality became the fight for inequality. One form of inequality was pitted against another on the theory that the only way to make people equal was for good inequality and bad inequality to fight it out until somehow one day we would all be equal. Or at least the right people would be equal and the wrong people would be unequal.
This same noxious formula of the fight for equality shamelessly transmuted into special privilege has flowed into every struggle that models itself on the civil rights movement. And with each battle, freedom has been lost as a new layer of privilege and the regulations that protect that privilege have been added. We have long ago lost the presumption of innocence, now everyone is guilty of something and the power to wield that guilt like a whip is the ultimate privilege.
With a new wave of civil rights movements popping up every few years, backed by academic papers, grants from the Ford Foundation and "groundbreaking books" with confrontational titles, it is easy not to notice how little actual freedom we have. We spend so much time on the barricades fighting for the next wave of freedom that we are too community organized to realize how much freedom we have lost. We lost it while demanding more regulations to protect our freedom to be regulated from all the people who would take our freedom away from us by giving us back our rights as individuals.
The line of groups marching up to the little counter and trading in freedoms for entitlements shows no sign of slowing down, but there are fewer and fewer of those freedoms to trade in. While those on line are under the impression that they are trading away other people's freedoms for greater power, the joke is on them. While they were trading away the freedoms of others, other people were trading away their freedoms.
And the Socialist devil reclining in the corner, sipping a cup of coffee while reading over a collection of Lenin's essays and Community Organizing for Dummies, has the last laugh.
Every tawdry mini-revolution marked by tenured martyrs who wrote angry essays and flew their little flags of privilege on every campus has ended with more power and less freedom. And power means nothing if not the privilege of making other people affirm your beliefs and tithe from their earnings to subsidize your lifestyle. The entitlement to power over others is the ultimate entitlement and the sum of all entitlements.
Freedom has been sold for the promise of more power over others and everyone grasps for power for fear that others will have power over them. Civil rights were sold out, not for equality, but for power. And no one is willing to settle for less than their own niche, their own entitlements and privileges. Everyone talks of equality but no one believes in it. All they believe in is getting a foothold on the ladder so that they are the ones trampling on the neck of another to avoid being trampled on.
Power breeds paranoia and every group jealously hoards its privileges fearful that they will be taken away. The more these groups demand their rights, the more certain it is that they are already abusing the rights of others. When they call for freedom, they mean power. When they call for equality, they mean privilege. When they denounce hate, they justify their own hate. When they complain about the culture of bigotry, they are expressing how much they hate others.
Sexual freedom fits this model as well as any other of the causes. Like all the other fake freedoms, it has come to mean the freedom to have power over others, to dictate their values, denounce their views and compel them to pay allegiance to the new system. These fake freedoms do not mean the ability to individually do what one could not do before, but the power to have the system compel others to do what you want them to do.
It is a perversion in the purest sense, all the more so because it begins with the whine of entitlement, "Why can't I just be accepted for who I am?" and ends with the roar of power, "Now you will do what I say."
Rape has become the ultimate sexual freedom. The forcible intimacy of compelling others to see the world in your terms. Of demeaning them at every turn, debasing everything they hold dear and then blaming it all on the victim for making them do it. The rapist is society's eternal victim, constantly compelled to rape, as he will explain at length in every court hearing. The only needs that matter are his needs and the only reasoning that matters is his reasoning.
The rape of American values is the ultimate sexual freedom and the ultimate sexual entitlement. After a few decades of raping the family, the rapists headed off to rape religious institutions, all in the name of forcing their values on others, a thing that they had complained incessantly about for generations when it was being done to them.
Progressive politics married to sexual politics requires greater levels of depravity to signal progress. Once Americans have come to accept one assault, the political rapists respond with a greater assault. Obsessed with resistance, they are less interested in supporting those who accede than in destroying those who do not, even if it is only a chicken franchise. Dissent of any kind is impermissible.
As Orwell notes in 1984, "All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour." In reverse, the endless liberal prattle about sexual freedom reduced to marching up down is sex gone political. It's the politicization and collectivization of the personal that the left dedicates all its efforts to. It isn't sexual freedom, but rather the destruction of sexual freedom and all forms of freedom.
Freedom means nothing if not autonomy and the rape culture of socialism is a perpetual attack on that autonomy. It is the horrifying vision invoked in George Orwell's 1984. "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But ... there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
To see that boot, visit your nearest government office, avoid the politicians who serve as the human face of Socialism, but call on a bureaucrat, follow the procedures, visit a campus and listen to a lecture on identity politics, or just listen to Obama's spokesmen and sit through an hour of MSNBC. You will see that same intoxication of power on display, that thrilling sensation of men and women who are hard at work trampling the American enemy forever.
Socialism has become the ultimate sexual freedom, thrilling to the forced intimacy of power over a captive population. Anyone who goes to the right schools or makes the right noises, who joins the right party, the only party for true power, who pounds the right pulpits, preaches the right cause and pushes the right buttons, can also put on the boot and feel that intoxicating sense of trampling the helpless for as long as the thousand year village that raises all our children and euthanizes all our elderly lasts.
We are swiftly running out of all other pleasures, those that require freedom or available resources, the new pleasures are those of power. The world we are speeding toward is a place where there are no ideas, only dogmas, no freedoms, only compulsions, no religion, only power, no right to bear arms, but many guns, and no sex, only rape.
The single socialist has spent decades raping America, but he is still lonely for rapists are always lonely. The curse of power is that there is never anyone to truly share it with. Power is paranoia and the poor egomaniac who lives to force others into his mold knows better than to trust anyone else not to do it to him too. This is the new freedom that the sexual revolutionaries offer us. The freedom to do unto others before they do unto us. To fear and hate everyone while demanding that everyone else give us what we want... or we'll take it from them.
Source: Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish blog
