Taboos in the future

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because of the whole gay marriage thing. Every so often, society goes through paradigm shifts. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes legal, if not universally approved of, today. Tomorow, it because a basic right.

Now the courts are deciding that the consitution is orientation-neutral. The constitution is exactly the same as it was fifty years ago, but if you’d tried to convince a judge to let Adam and Steve marry, you’d be laughed at. The question wouldn’t even have occured to people.

So I’ve been wondering, what things that are taboo now will be legalized? The Founding Fathers couldn’t conceive of women and blacks voting; in 1950 no one in their right mind would take gay marriage seriously. What idea is considered laughible and repugnent today, but will be the center of the next civil rights struggle?

It also works in the other direction. Slavery was once considered respectable, and a status symbol. No doubt some things we think are perfectly fine today will cause our descendents to hang their heads in shame.

So, just for fun, what do you predict will be legalized/criminalized in the future?

Legalized
Bestiality and necrophilia are some of the last sexual taboos. I predict they will go the way of their predecessors.
The official reason you can’t make hot monkey love to a monkey is that animals can’t give informed consent. Which makes sense, but I personally believe that the main reason is what I call the “ick factor”. People feel disgusted by such behavior, so there’s no legion of activists challenging the courts over “zoophilia rights”.
The previous sexual revolutions also were at the mercy of the “ick”. As I noted above, the parts of the Constitution that support gay marriage were there fifty years ago. But because of the “ick”, no one bothered to interpret it that way.
Now I can see this going two ways. As the technology for simulated sex grows more advanced, people with all sorts of… interesting tastes will be able to argue that what they do harms nobody. The social stigma of being attracted to animals will wear off, although anything involving actual live sheep will still be met with disproval.
Or, if virtual reality sex doesn’t become real enough or widespread, people may still experience a paradigm shift. You’ll have scientists attaching wires to the brains of cows to see whether they really mind or not. Given that many female animals get forced by prospective mates, you can probably find a species where a groping farm boy gets the same response as any old male.
Necrophilia is even easier. Already on this message board, you find people saying, “But who is he really harming? It’s just a piece of meat.” I can see kinky people donating their bodies to be, uh, played with, just as people leave their bodies to science.

Criminalized
Tabacco.
Now you’re probably thinking, she thinks they’re gonna legalize sheep-boinking, but they’ll still be scared of drugs? Let me explain my reasoning.
Tabacco is very bad for you. As far as I know, it’s much more dangerous than pot. (If I am wrong, please let me know). The reason that cigarettes are okay’d is that smoking has been around a long time. If we tried to ban them, we’d get about the same success rate as the Prohibition. Weed, on the other hand, never became respectable enough to be saved.
Public service annoucements, drug prevention classes, and people dying horribly of lung cancer are shrinking the market. If things continue this way, there won’t be enough respectable smokers to stand up for their cigars.
The goverment already has been trying to stop smoking using everything short of an all-out ban: PSA’s, no-smoking zones, cigarette taxes, “This product will make you die horribly” warnings. When we’ve only got a handful of people standing up for their baccy, you bet the health nannies will be falling all over themselves to ban it. Diehards will still smoke, of course, but in secret, like pot enthusiasts today.
Not that there won’t be drugs in the future. They’ll just be safer. Caught between the recreational mind-scramblers on one hand, and the health nannies on the other, the goverment will be approve lab-synthesized chemicals. Quality control will be strictly enforced, and scientists will come with new drugs that make you high, but aren’t dangerous or addictive. (They’ll try, anyway). Instead of buying crack cut with mothballs on some shady street corner, you’ll just go to the supermarket for a Happy Pill[sup]TM[/sup], Now With Less OD’s!

Goodnight. If you think I’m crazy, you’ll have to wait till tommorow to tell me.

2

If gay marriage is legalized it’s hard to think of a good reason why polygamy would not follow.

3

It’d probally require mandatory pre-nups and clarification of the status of co-spouses, but I can’t think of any other objection.

4

I could see how polygamy would cause a logistical nightmare from a legal perspective. Imagine a family comprised of 5 husbands, 9 wives, and their 20 shared offspring, plus homes, property, lands, etc. Now imagine one or some of those spouses suing for divorce. How do you divide property between all these spouses, much less decide custody and visitation for the various co-parents? I could easily see something like that turning into a massive free-for-all that drags on for years.

5

Man, they’d just be better off incorporating and selling shares!

6

Tobacco will probably be criminalized, probably right after the tabacco criminalization.

7

I imagine wasting energy will become taboo, unless we find a new source of cheap energy.

8

Man oh man, I can’t wait to see the bumper stickers…

“Outlaw cigarettes and only outlaws will have cigarettes”
“Ask me about my monkey/human hybrid Honor Student”
“Welcome to Arkansas, where the men are men and the sheep are nervous”

9

But I’ll still be able to enjoy a tomacco sandwich.

10

I think shirtless-ness in public is becoming more and more taboo for men, as well as showing their thighs. ever.

11

I don’t usually say this but - cite?

12

But back to the OP, it wouldn’t surprise me to see some sports activities prohibited. Boxing will probably be the first to go - it’s pretty much violence by intent. I could imagine society turning against a risk of serious injury that serves no purpose except entertainment.

13

Actually, I’m not too worried about that. Yes, a single case with many parties would take more resources than a single case with few parties, but the flip side of the coin is that a single case with many parties would not take more resources than many cases with few parties. The bottom line might very well come out the same, given that with any given number of relationships, a portion will fail and end up in court.

What tends to happen in matters in which there are a bunch of people all fighting over custody is that one person or one couple usually ends up with sole custody, so as to provide stability for the child, and the rest divy up what access time a sole access parent might otherwise receive. The party or parties who win sole custody are usually the one(s) who acted as primary parents prior to the family blowing apart. Pure crèche based parenting is vanishingly rare.

BTW, in Canada the crime of polygamy is presently being tested against a Mormon offshoot in British Columbia. It will make for an interesting test of the Charter right to freedom of religion. The unfortunate thing about the prosecution is that although it is attempting to deal with a community that is grossly unfair to young women, it will set the law for all polygamy, including simple poly families that do not have all the religious trappings of extreme patriarchy, arranged child marriages, and poverty of education, but instead are simply regular familes with one or two more parents in the mix.

As far as the money aspect goes, it’s really no big deal (and in fact is already covered by the Family Law Act in Ontario).

14

Definitely, legalization of drugs. And yes, tobacco stays legal, as long as other people don’t have to inhale your smoke.

Universal access to reproductive science for singles or same-sex couples.

Children’s rights, especially concerning sexuality and religious indoctrination.

Animal rights; banning of animal-related sports.

Laws limiting “designer babies” and celebrity clones.

15

Confederate Flags.

High Sugar Content Foods.

Washing your own car at home, rather than at a car wash.

Christian evangelizing, or witnessing.

All look like they are to be on the chopping block, to me.

16

Agreed, and that’s only how complicated it gets for a closed-system family. Many, many polys (polies?) have arrangements where:

A and B are married to each other. A is also with C; B is also with D. C is also dating E and F. D is dating G, who is also dating A, but D doesn’t much care for A and certainly wouldn’t want to be married in law or in spirit to her…

Who’s married to whom? Are they all married to each other whether or not they consider themselves intimately involved with their lover’s lover’s lover? When a break-up occurs, who has rights to which property? Are A and D married to each other, just by virtue of their related relationships, even though neither of them particularly wish to share their lives with each other – much less property, inheritance, children, power of attorney for health care…

And then you have to make this single set of laws flexible enough to apply universally to any poly system – closed triad, hub-and-spokes, tangled spiderweb, constantly shifting open system, something else – without utterly breaking down.

I could see it becoming de-criminalized, but to avoid legal nightmares I think it would just be easier to have the individuals involved draw up their own contracts based on their particular familial arrangements. I can’t see it working otherwise.

Agree with this too. Human “moral progress” (for lack of a better term) seems to be trending toward the “Harm none, do as you will” model – once we recognized that interracial marriages weren’t harmful to anyone, people eventually got over prohibiting / complaining about them. We recognized that withholding property rights or the vote based on arbitrary and ultimately meaningless criteria such as sex or race was dumb. I don’t see tobacco becoming illegal, as long as the second-hand smoke stays far away from others. In your own space, however, smoke all ya want. I can definitely see it falling out of favor, though, as more people move over toward the “smoking is gross and dumb” side of the aisle.

The one relatively large paradigm shift I’m anticipating is the de-pathologizing of BDSM. Gay rights were helped quite a bit when the DSM (which one was it? III?) finally codified that being gay wasn’t in and of itself a psychological disorder. DSM V is coming out soon, and there’s been a bunch of lobbying to get the “pathology/disorder” status removed from BDSM. Once we begin removing the stigma, more people will shift to seeing it as another variation on sexual orientation; maybe eventually it won’t be an automatic black mark against someone (in terms of jobs, custody, whatever). Obviously consent and discretion will still be important, but it’s the same way currently for vanilla sex. In a custody hearing, courts would frown on a parent that brought home a string of one-night-stands for perfectly non-kinky sex while junior was in the corner waiting for mommy/daddy to finish. (Ehr… pun not intended.)

17

Interesting.

I agree that legalizing poly marriage will happen as soon as the family-law issues are sorted out. BDSM is covered under the “the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” principle (consenting adults and all). I don’t know about bestiality or necrophilia–are there communities large enough to push effectively for them?

I’ll go in a different direction. What with the economic collapse and all, it wouldn’t take too much more to make private banking tabu. We already see a downside to extreme financial privacy. All it needs is a social structure that rewards public disclosure of personal money matters.

18

Another affect of an economic collapse may be to make extended families - adults living with their parents, or adult siblings sharing a house - more acceptable.

19

Where you are in Ontario the family law issues have already been sorted out. Anyone can apply for custody or access, support is contngent upon relationship rather than on formal marriage, and marriage definitions for propery disputes include polygamous marriages.

For example, the Family Law Actincludes the following:

“1(1) . . . ‘parent’ includes a person who has demonstrated a settled intention to treat a child as a child of his or her family . . .”

“31(1). Every parent has an obligation to provide support for his or her unmarried child who is a minor or is enrolled in a full time program of education, to the extent that the parent is capable of doing so.”

“32. Every child who is not a minor has an obligation to provide support, in accordance with need, for his or her parent who has cared for or provided support for the child, to the extent that the child is capable of doing so.”

“1(2). In the definition of “spouse”, a reference to marriage includes a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid . . .”

“30. Every spouse has an obligation to provide support for himself or herself and for the other spouse, in accordance with need, to the extent that he or she is capable of doing so.”

The Children’s Law Reform Actincludes the following:

“21. A parent of a child or any other person may apply to a court for an order respecting custody of or access to the child or determining any aspect of the incidents of custody of the child.”

The Succession Law Reform Actincludes the following:

“1(2). In the definition of “spouse”, a reference to marriage includes a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid.”

In addition to statute law that covers custody, access and child support without reguard to the number or formality of relationships between parties, and statue law that covers property issues between married parties including polygamous marriages, we also have well established family law in equity that deals with property disputes within families where there is no formal marriage.

In short, in Ontario the law is already there to handle breakdown of polygamous marriages. Our not sanctioning polygamous marriages in Ontario is not a result of the law not being ready to deal with them – it is simply that the people in general do not want polygamous marriages to be sanctioned for a number of reasons that have little if anything to do with litigation.

20

Bottom line? It might be a while before you and I, Sunspace, find oursleves married off together into some woman’s harum.