A bad Idea continues its march through History

In line with the principle of nondiscrimination with regard to sexual matters that Rocco Buttiglione supports so solidly, it appears that unemployed German women may lose unemployment benefits if they turn down jobs as prostitutes. On current public understandings it’s hard to find fault with the result. After all, sexual standards are purely personal and of no conceivable public relevance, so what legitimate grounds could there be for the state to distinguish the work of a sex worker from that of a waitress or dental hygenist? Meanwhile, dutiful bureaucrats are threatening to confiscate the children of German parents who want to homeschool them because they don’t want them trained in the new public truth regarding sex. Again, it’s a sensible decision from the perspective that’s now established as mainstream—the state has a superior interest in the education of its citizens and the well-being of children, and public rationality trumps private prejudice, so who can criticize? (And isn’t it great that the liberal Left has taken government out of our bedrooms?)

The point, of course, is that it’s absurd to claim that government can be separated from standards regarding something as basic to human life as sex. It’s as silly as claiming that government can be separated from religious understandings. The absurdity is infinitely compounded in the case of EU governments that take on direct responsibility for public attitudes and all aspects of social life. The effect of such claims is to advance particular and (to put it mildly) highly questionable understandings of sex, religion and what not under cover of claims of neutrality that make it impossible to discuss anything, and that transfer all decisions to the “experts” who are the appropriate persons to determine the requirements of abstract neutral principles. The prostitution and homeschooling issues are an example of what can happen. I would expect one or both of the results to get reversed, but others—like “gay marriage” and the sort of sex ed that bothered the homeschoolers—will not, and will continue to undermine and disrupt the institutions by which people live in ever more aggressive and fundamental ways, all in the name of a perfectly rationalized bureaucratic and market order claiming to be based solely on equality, economics, and value-free social science.