Dr. Ben Carson has been forced to apologize for defending marriage as it’s been understood since time immemorial. He’s also been forced out as this year’s commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins, because he called marriage “a well-established, fundamental pillar of society and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality—it doesn’t matter what they are—they don’t get to change the definition.” He was immediately vilified, even though he didn’t equate bestiality with homosexuality.
But when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked attorney Ted Olson whether incest might be permitted with no state restrictions on marriage, nobody condemned her.
Both Carson and Sotomayor asked whether gay marriage supporters recognized any limits to their redefinition of this basic social institution, a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry.
It’s somewhat late in the game for liberals to get exercised about bestiality. In 1948, Kinsey and associates concluded that “sexual contacts between the human and animals of other species are at no point basically different from those that are involved in erotic responses to human situations.” Today, college textbooks on human sexuality call bestiality nothing more than “atypical behavior.”
Princeton professor Peter Singer asks us to keep an open mind about Fred having sex with Fido. He says, “sex with animals does not always involve cruelty,” and that “mutually satisfying activities” of a sexual nature should be respected. At a Yale “sensitivity training” exercise, Dr. Jill McDevitt touted bestiality’s merits. She wanted to “increase compassion for people who may engage in activities that are not what you would personally consider normal.” Dr. Carson is a good man who was framed. It’s the sexologists and the Ivy Leaguers who need to explain themselves.
