I'm a bit behind on this one -- about two years behind -- but I only just saw it on The Daily Show recently. Pat Robertson was concerned that hate crime legislation, in addition to preventing violence against openly gay people, might protect people who have sex with ducks.
Yes, sex with ducks. That's so stupid it's not even wrong.
On the day that any individual of any species of duck demonstrates a sufficient level of awareness and intelligence to be able to legally sign contracts we can start talking about ducks having sex with humans. Until that day, however, any interaction of the type Robertson feverishly imagines would be abuse, and plain old animal cruelty.
But what does this say about the conservative concept of sex, and especially women? Robertson obviously believes that sexual attraction to fowl is bad, but completely fails to grasp -- or at least believes his audience won't grasp -- that the key distinction between this case and the case of human-human attraction is the question of agency. A duck cannot consent, a human adult can. It almost seems that for the conservative male, the agency of their sex partners is rather irrelevant.
We've certainly seen conservatives who have little regard for the agency or autonomy of women. Suffrage was won over their opposition, and every slow gain since has been met by bastions of male privilege asserting that women don't belong in the halls of power or academia. The abortion debate in particular has highlighted how little regard conservative minds give to female agency. They want abortion to be murder, but say they won't send women who self-abort to prison. How does that make sense unless all women are essentially children without the ability to make moral choices?
Authoritarian morality is rule-based. Men having sex with women is "normal" and everything else is equally abhorrent by virtue of breaking that rule. Any other object of sexual attraction -- and that's what they are: objects -- adult of the same sex, child, dog, turtle, duck -- they're all the same.
- jack*
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