Christmas Eve I had a dream. In it, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) struck down the role of Santa Claus as discriminatory because of his twice-checked lists of “bad or good” and “naughty or nice” children, noting such distinctions were offensive and prejudicial to Canadian children with minority or alternate naughty “lifestyles.” You don’t have to be Freud to understand the dream’s inspiration.
In their Dec. 21 ruling legalizing most sex clubs, the SCC pronounced community standards of decency irrelevant to the for-profit facilitation of group sex for kinky risk-takers and voyeurs.
The ruling comes as the culmination of a seven-year legal battle by Jean-Paul Labaye, owner of the Montreal sex club L’Orage. A news story on Monday cited two of L’Orage’s customers, Michel Delbecchi and his wife Chantal, who used to fear being arrested in a “bawdy house” for public indecency. The Delbecchis are setting up a new household with a young woman they met at L’Orage, whom both enjoy as a mutual lover, but that doesn’t mean they will stop giving their custom to the club. The article did not indicate whether or not the Delbecchis and their lover will be regular attendees at L’Orage’s featured Tuesday afternoon “gang bangs.”
Decades ago Pierre Trudeau said, “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” What he meant was that in the privacy of their homes, adults had the right to indulge their sexual tastes or fantasies, including group sex, without fear of state punishment. And reasonable Canadians agree with him.
Ideologically liberal judges are not always reasonable, however. Instead of imagining their own minor children being prepped for future guilt-free experiences at sex clubs by online marketing and reinforcement from teachers and the media that respect for gang bangs is a mainstream Canadian value, they consult Close Personal Relationship Theory (or some such) for its take on public group sex.
Such theories dictate that society should not make social or moral distinctions between sexual “arrangements” (the monogamous marriage of two people simply being one arbitrary sexual arrangement of many, no better or worse), because any sexual behaviour freely chosen by adults can (theoretically) be neither “dysfunctional” nor “harmful.” The judicial application of this theory dumbs deviancy down, levelling formerly high moral standards in order to foster the popular illusion that our nation is making social progress rather than losing our way.
Not so long ago, indecency was easily identifiable by everyone: If an activity that you normally thought about or did only in private caused not just embarrassment, but also shame when done in public, it was indecent. The individual’s sense of shame has always been a community’s essential aid in corralling amoral desires within socially constructive sexual boundaries.
Once deviancy is dumbed down far enough, though, shame-based distinctions aren’t honoured as evidence of a moral compass, but are simply labelled “prejudice,” the pejorative word used in this SCC ruling.
Historically, feeling shame has deterred indecent behaviour. But what restrains the sexual mainstream is paradoxically an aphrodisiac for sexual risk-takers. Sexual extremists thrive on transgressing a community’s limits of tolerance. Protected community standards of decency drive such sexual outliers, appropriately, to private remedies. The Delbecchis should find their own fellow sex-obsessed hobbyists, in other words.
When protections against extreme public behaviours are abandoned, and indecency is adjudged shame-free, extremists will inevitably seek their aphrodisiac in ever more transgressive experiments. Expect far worse indecency with seven of nine Supremes decreeing—a “supreme” irony—non-judgmentalism toward sexual degradation as the preferred Canadian value.
Two commonsensical SCC judges understand this disturbing corollary. To their credit, Justices Michel Bastarache and Louis LeBel warned of more transgressive “rights”—polygamy, bestiality—waiting their turn for special pleading with now-justifiable hope. This dissenting minority wrote: “We are convinced that this new approach strips of all relevance the social values that the Canadian community as a whole believes should be protected”, and “introduces a concept of tolerance that does not seem to be justifiable according to any principle whatsoever.”
Last night, I had another dream with Biblical narrative overtones: And it came to pass that those who loved Santa rose up in their numbers and called the SCC a false counsellor for setting aside the wisdom of the generations.
But the SCC harnessed its reign-dear cliches to its law-full Charter-ed sleigh – “Tolerance,” “Equality,” “Not-America,” all led by red-nosed “Minority Rights,” and drove Santa’s followers to retreat down Ottawa’s slippery slopes.
And lo, it came to pass in 2006 that those who believed in sexual modesty and public decency and the power of shame to keep decency’s flame alive were condemned by the SCC henceforth to be regarded as Canada’s new sexual perverts.
Did I wake or am I dreaming still?
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