Mark Steyn: ‘Kathy Shaidle had a short but ingenious post the other day…’

Mark Steyn writes:

It’s always a mistake to expect first principles from the left. In Turkey President Erdogan famously explained that democracy is a train you ride until the stop you want to get to – and then you get off. That’s how the left feels about “rights”. There are no principles, only accretions of power.

For those of us cursed by principled argument, the problem of the passing years is that, whatever comes up in the headlines, we had our say five, ten, twenty years ago, and haven’t changed our minds. Six years ago I wrote a column for Maclean’s, which was itself a restatement of a column from The Western Standard another five years before that – all about polygamy, and the gay activists purporting to scoff at it (…)

[Behold the] Headline from this morning’s Politico:

It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy
Why group marriage is the next horizon of social liberalism

The right never learns that there is no last concession, only a nano-second’s respite to catch your breath and then (to reprise another Kathy Shaidle line) more KY for that slippery slope.

Someday soon some judge somewhere will rule in favor of polygamy, not because the left is especially invested in this particular “expansion” of rights but because of the opportunities it provides for further vandalism of what’s left of the old order. That’s what matters. (…)

In the gloomier moments of my own case, my lawyers and I occasionally discuss how, if it all goes pear-shaped in DC, we’ll be off to SCOTUS. But we’re not Larry Flynt in the Eighties anymore. It would seem to me rather complacent to assume these days that there are five votes for free speech at the US Supreme Court.

UPDATE:

Or as I call it, “Church-rape”….

(Extra points for the new avi, Jim…)