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Decline and Fall

It’s worth thinking about this story ever so briefly. In it, we learn that a girl who the nation was first introduced to at age 16 on the hit MTV show "16 and Pregnant" and would, as the series progressed, endure a breast augmentation (with the cameras there to catch her recovery, natch) in order to further her "modeling" "career" is now, at the age of 21, in the process of trying to "leak" a sex tape she recorded with the aid of professional pornographers.

My do they grow up fast these days.

I’m not sure I have much more to add. If that sequence of events horrifies you, good. If it doesn’t, I’m not surprised. We live in a world where infanticide doesn’t rate coverage in the press, and then, when the media is called out for their failure, the left insists that nothing is amiss in the failure to cover a serial killer who kept pieces of corpses in his workspace. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asks, "Are they completely deluded? Are they cynically lying? No doubt, on the whole, a mix of both."

No doubt.

I’m old enough to remember when one was a horrible bigot for insisting that polygamy was the obvious and natural end result of legalizing gay marriage. In the digital pages of Slate, the worries promulgated by the likes of Stanley Kurtz were haughtily dismissed as nutty. Sixteen years later, that haughty dismissal has disappeared. Instead, we have tacit acceptance—nay, advocacy. "Legalize Polygamy!" the headline screams. "Legalize Incest!" it’ll scream in a few more years. "So what if an 18-year-old girl wants to marry her 65-year-old father? She’s an adult. It’s her damn choice." I support gay marriage, but its advocates have never really grappled with the slippery slope other than to sniff "ugh, what a fallacy, quit being an ugly homophobe" before moving on as you stand there and sputter.

We live in a world in which "snitches get stitches." Basketball players make videotapes telling those in the inner city that they’ll be better off if killers roam the streets before going on to host fundraisers for the president. Meanwhile, our young people have internalized that ideal. They write scathing blog posts attacking someone who dared to point out that a cheating bitch is a cheating bitch. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Decline and fall, man. Decline and fall.