Slate, fresh from a heart-rending plea to stop announcing the sex of children at birth, continues leading the charge for the destruction of the normal with a call for polygamy.  Golly, who could ever have predicted that?

After that, it will be incest and pedophilia (note that both links see them as neutral lifestyle choices and endorse them with the same "love who you want" language).  The day is coming when the Church will be attacked, not for having permitted pedophiles in its ranks, but for forbidding them.

Meanwhile, the same is true for the *other* sacred thing we keep in our pants: our wallets. Those of us eager to tell others that their sex lives do not begin and end with consent as the sole criterion of the good often respond with ferocity to the suggestion that the same is true of our financial lives. So between those who respond with contempt for the Church's teaching on the common good with regard to sex and those who respond with contempt for the Church's teaching on the common good with regard to money (and many hold both teachings in contempt), there is plenty of contempt for the Church's teaching to cover the whole political spectrum. Lefties call their contempt for the Church's teaching "primacy of conscience" and righties call it "prudential judgment". But both agree that the Church can be ignored when it gets in the way of absolute autonomy.

The short term gain from this is obvious, as the short term gain of the worm on the hook is obvious to the fish. In the Land where Consent is the Sole Criterion of the Good, all is permissible--until the powerful reach such a concentration of power that they can say (of the freedom of the powerless and divided mass of slaves), "What so sacred about consent anyway?"  That's where all this is leading of course.  Making individual consent the sole criterion of the good is hell's way of instituting one of it's oldest strategies: divide and conquer.  A society of atomized individuals with no regard for the common good is a society ripe for conquest.

In Catholic thought, freedom is ordered to the common good, not to selfish chaos.  Freedom abused is simply a brief prelude to slavery, and the west is clamoring for its chains. Something to think about as America poises between the choice to preserve the ordered liberty bequeathed us by the Founders, or to throw it all away in pursuit of a vision of Every Man for Himself in the bedroom and the market (aka "Divide and Conquer"). If we will not have God as Father we will most assuredly have Man as Master.