I’m not entirely convinced that current laws fully cover the complexities of the more complicated open relationships.
For ex.
Say I am married to my husband. My husband also has a husband. This other husband also has a wife. This wife is not intimate with my husband and they don’t consider themselves married, but they are friends. I am not intimate with my husband’s husband, nor do we consider ourselves married to each other, but we are friends. Wife and I are civil out of respect for our husbands, but don’t much care for each other. We definitely don’t consider ourselves married to each other.
This wife decides to divorce her husband. When it comes time to divvy up shared property, does she have rights to property shared between her husband and mine? Does she have rights to property I brought into my relationship with my husband? One the one hand it’s communal household property. On the other, when I brought my grandma’s antique hope chest into my married household, I never planned for it to get snatched up by a woman I didn’t even choose to have a relationship with.
If the relationships are a chain, or an open system, it’s a lot more complicated than if it’s a closed circle. Wife with two husbands? Husband with two wives? Two husbands, two wives who share and swap? Fairly easy to draw the lines. However if every partner has multiple partners, who belongs to (and has rights to) which household? I may never even meet my husband’s husband’s wife’s wife’s secondary husband. Does he have rights to the property I share with my husband? If not, how far along the “chain” do you have to travel before you lose those rights? And how can that distance, if decided by the legal system, be anything but arbitrary and quite possibly not reflective of how the actual people in that relationship feel about things?
(I also think that the US legal system is even less prepared to handle such things than Canada, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Christian evangelizing seems to be on the upswing, if anything.
The government isn’t likely to pass laws against witnessing unless it involves government property. The Constitution forbids the making of such laws.
One possible social taboo in the future: It will be considered strange to try to insult a man by claiming that he has female sexual organs. No one will understand why that is an insult. No coach will insult his team during practice by calling them “a bunch of damned pussies.” It won’t make sense. No teacher will shame a male student by threatening to make him sit with the girls. Gender shaming will be as uncool as racial shaming.
I can see marijuana being legalized, but that’s a low hanging fruit.
Another one is stem cell research and cloning becoming non-issues.
Gramma and gramps listening to deathmetal on the golden oldies station will be interesting.
Extreme body mods will become more commonplace. CEO’s with tattoos were once unheard of.
Universal wellfare. Automation will make any form of labor, other than artistic, obsolete.
OR
Genocidal depopulation of the planet, if the rich folks can have robot servants and manufacturing, and decide to let the rest of us starve to death.
Umm, I think genocidal depopulation is already taboo. At least among the people I hang with. So is universal welfare, actually.
I think Boyo Jim’s point was that the taboo on those ideas could be lifted.
Yes, I think one or the other will become a norm.