Children are people, but the entire argument of pro choice is that a fetus of a certain age is not an actual human being yet. It's not a child right vs adult right issue. It's based primarily in the fact that the fetus is not an actual human with rights yet. At least in theory.
It's not just about abortion. I'm including no-fault divorce, SSM, the coming polygamy debate, etc.
Every single time such issues have come up over the past century, the desires of consenting adults have won out over the welfare of children. The strong over the weak.
The fact remains that the prevailing view is that an impressionable child does not have the ability to consent, as they do not understand the scope. I see what you are saying, but laws have always limited rights to age groups. For instance, drinking ages and military age minimums. There is an assumption, and a large one in my opinion, that for some reason ssm would not only evolve into degradation of western values but also disintegrate centuries of right limitations. I just don't see it.
To be clear, I don't think SSM is the
cause of any of this. These are simply the inevitable fruits of certain deep-seated and inaccurate assumptions about human nature within liberal political philosophy. But yes, I'm very critical of modern sexual ethics, because "consent" is a very flimsy nail upon which to hang something as weighty as human sexuality. It simply won't hold it.
Animals do not have the same constitutional rights as humans, so there would never be a reason to grant them legal relationship status with a human being. The other end (no pun intended) is that there is very little way to prove consent with an animal. There are legal definitions to consent used in rape cases, but those would make zero sense in judging the consent of an animal. Furthermore, many of the same concepts around minors not understanding the scope of consent would also stand for animals.
We kill animals without their consent all the time. Isn't sexual intercourse with an animal less morally fraught than ending its life with finality? Again, I just don't see consent as much of legal bulwark here. It won't hold.
Re-paganizing is very exaggerated way of looking at granting legal rights. In ancient worlds, there were many things that were starkly different about their democracy vs our current one.
And democracy is no guarantee against injustice, as the Arab Spring demonstrated recently. It's undeniable that the West has been deChristianizing since the Enlightenment. So the question becomes: where are we headed? Progressives would argue that we're
evolving inexorably into a more humane and just society, but I'd argue that we've just gotten better at hiding our injustice. Instead of exposing unwanted infants to the elements, we now simply murder them
in utero; the death and destruction caused by our military-industrial complex has all been exported to foreign countries, etc.
As I mentioned above, my problem is not with SSM
per se, but with its roots in liberal philosophy and the utterly inadequate sexual ethics that tradition has left us. SSM, at least of the sort we're seeing now, is a novel development, but you're correct that homosexual relationships were very common before Christianity.
From that article I linked earlier:
In the Ancient world, it was simply taken for granted that sex was about power. The social order was defined by a hierarchy of concentric circles. At the center, the free, male, citizen, and then in concentric circles, women, freedmen, foreigners, children, and so on. The main paradigm for sex was not heterosexual/homosexual, married/unmarried, even reproductive/non-reproductive, it was active/passive or dominant/submissive, and the main taboo was for someone who was supposed to be “active” to be “passive”.
This is why sexual slavery (particularly of children) was not frowned upon, and neither was homosexuality as long as it involved an older man and a younger man so that it was clear that the relationship had an “active” and a “passive” participant. Heterosexual marriage was also perfectly understood, since women were of a lower social status than men.
It’s worth dwelling for a second on the world that these beliefs created. The practice of expositio, the exposing of infants, was widespread and unproblematic, since children were of lower status than adults. And the extant sources we have concur: the typical fate of exposed infants was either death or ‘adoption’ into slavery, which was typically sexual slavery since that was the most profitable use for a child. Brothels specializing in child sex slaves were established, legal businesses; the majority, it seems, specializing in boy sex slaves. Sources describe sex with castrated slaves as particularly exciting, and sources report that babies were sometimes castrated so that they could work in brothels later on. Pagan apologists roundly mocked the early Christians for not only not practicing expositio (an echo of which can be found in anti-Catholic Protestant polemics against teeming mackerel-snapping families) but rescuing exposed infants and adopting them.
That's what we're returning to. The Western world conflates technological progress (which actually occurs) with social progress (which happens slowly, if at all, and is always in danger of being lost, since humans are prone to sin). In other words, our worship of "progress" is little more than the worship of technology, which is just power over nature, others and ourselves. That's paganism.
We can exist in a world where religious beliefs do not govern our people without moral decline.
Humans are religious creatures by nature. When institutional religions decline, people find other things to worship. In this case, much of what you take for granted about the
status quo (limited government, human rights, separation of church and state, religious freedom, etc.) were directly inherited from Christendom, and will not persist in the absence of a Christian moral framework.
