Leah Libresco puzzles over a growing trend

Over at Unequally Yoked, Ms. Libresco is throwing in her two cents about this whole trend nowadays of looking to some scientific basis for ethics.  I'm shocked that there is any shock.  This is, after all, the logical consequence of where we've come and how we got here.   By now, the facade, the lie, the joke that was post-war liberalism should be known to all.  There was never, ever any desire for a nation where everyone is free to think what they want, believe what they want, say what they want, and do what they want.  That was a sales pitch.

Today, we are seeing those who once championed the age of relative truth and complete openness to all ideas, being the same ones willing to cheer and celebrate when the government steps in and attempts to crush the right to not be liberal.

Now, in the heyday of the liberal promise, the idea that there was no normal, no truth, no real objective morality was the blank check with which the left cashed in its various beliefs and standards.  It was the oxygen upon which the entire gay rights movement sucked away in order to validate the elimination of humanity's ages's old belief about sexuality.  You think homosexuality isn't normal?  Who's to say what is normal? Capt. Pierce asks Frank Burns in an early MASH episode dedicated to promoting gay rights.  Note well that in that episode, as well as most defenses of homosexuality back then, it was not that there is a gene that makes gay the same as being Asian or African, nor was it the idea that heterosexual procreative sex is only seen as normal because of a vast, homophobic conspiracy.  It was simply based on the idea that all truth is relative.  What is normal after all?

Now, of course, that idea has passed.  Why?  Because those who once said such things can now smell the milk at the finish line.  They can taste the banquet of political power and influence.  They hold domination in many of our institutions that control the narrative of our civilization.  And with such power, the last thing they want is a nation of open minded debate, and respect for those who fail to conform to their own dogmas and absolute truths which, increasingly, they can now enforce.

The problem, of course, is that those old time liberals had pretty much obliterated the idea of absolute truths. Since evertying is relative, and we sure can't appeal to personal opionion (Archie Bunker) or - chuckle - religious dogmas to support our truth claims (Stereotypical Fundamentalist Religious Zealot/Inquisitor), where is the good liberal seeking to impose his or her values on the world to go?  The answer is obvious: Science!

Yes, it's the idea that if we make a truth claim, it isn't that we want to impose our values, it's that we have to impose our values.  We don't want to start telling people how they can eat, but science has proven that in 20 years everyone is going to be so fat that the world blows up, and we can't have that.  And science also shows that spanking kids leads to Nazis, that not celebrating homosexual lifestyles causes homosexuals to kill themselves, and that not being liberal is likely to cause the universe to implode and all life as we know it to vanish at the speed of light.  So you see, it isn't as if there really is some 'objective moral truth' we're appealing to, it's just that the clear and obvious science shows there's only one acceptable option, and it just happens coincidently to be that view I hold.   In other words, we don't want to have to mandate conformity to our indepsutable values, but we owe it to you.