From Homophobia to Anti-Bigotry: How Did Christians Become the New Pariahs?

From Homophobia to Anti-Bigotry: How Did Christians Become the New Pariahs?

"Davidson has admitted that he used to be gay himself—or at least had “homosexual experiences.” But at some point he decided that it was not for him. He has been married to his wife for 35 years and has two children. He believes that where he has gone other people can follow, and so through his group he offers counselling on a voluntary basis to other people who would like to move from being gay to becoming a heterosexual like himself who admits that he still gets—though doesn’t act on – certain “urges.”...

“Do you know what we call these people, Dr Michael?” Piers Morgan asked. “We call them horrible little bigots, in the modern world. Just bigoted people who actually talk complete claptrap and are in my view a malevolent and dangerous part of our society. What’s the matter with you? How can you think that nobody’s born gay and they all get corrupted and they can all be cured? Who are you to say such garbage?”

A relatively unflustered Davidson asked Morgan for evidence that people are born gay, pointing out that neither the American Psychological Association nor the Royal College of Psychiatrists believe that homosexuality is innate and unchangeable. At which point his interviewer ordered him to “stop talking for a moment” and “stop banging on about whacky-backy scientists in America.” Morgan then continued to shout at his guest, “Shut up you old bigot,” before he brought the whole interview to a close with the words “I’ve had enough of him. Dr Michael, shut up.” And so it finished. ITV had sent a car to a guest’s home in the early morning to bring him to a national television studio only for him to be told during his interview to shut up...

I may be the only out person at this gay-cure film-screening. But I suspect that I am not the only gay in the room...

[There are] several interviewees who were gay once but now appear here with their faces blacked out. Perhaps it is too charitable to reflect that it wasn’t so long ago that this need for blackened-out faces and back-of-head shots would have applied the other way around.

Towards the film’s end an Irish pastor sums up a part of the film’s point. He explains that he doesn’t mind people holding out the view that homosexuality is inherent and unchangeable. He just wants to be allowed to be able to hold his view. As Dr Baskerville reiterates, only one position on this matter appears to be able to be held in academia and the media, and that is “promotion” of homosexuality. “Sexuality is being politicized,” we are told in the final moments. And then, after another inexplicable reference to the Ancient Jews, the film ends with the dramatic yet careful line: “It is time to accept difference.”...

The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them. Do you allow arguments that worked for you to work for others? Are reciprocity and tolerance principles or fig-leaves? Do those who have been censored go on to censor others when the ability is in their own hands? Today the Vue cinema is on one side. A few decades ago they might have been on the other. And Pink News and others who celebrate their victory in chasing Voices of the Silenced a mile down the road one February night seem very ready to wield such power over a private event. In doing so they contradict the claims made by gay rights activists from the start of the battle for gay equality, which is that it should be no business of anyone else what consenting adults get up to in private. If that goes for the rights of gay groups then surely it ought to apply to the rights of Christian fundamentalists and other groups too...

None of the press which had sought to silence Voices of the Silenced had shown that Davidson or his colleagues were forcing unwilling participants to submit to a regime of heterosexual conversion...

In May 2013 Morgan had voted against the law introducing gay marriage into the UK. One year later, in 2014, she said that she now supported gay marriage and would vote for it if it had not already become law. Another year later, in 2015, she was declaring views such as those she herself had held two years earlier as not merely evidence of “extremism” but fundamentally un-British.

In the 1990s Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s “defence of marriage act” which sought to prevent gay marriage from becoming possible in the United States. She watched as he backed the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for gays in the US military, meaning that any gay soldier who told even one other person about their sexuality could immediately be dismissed from the armed forces. As Robert Samuels wrote in the Washington Post, “Hillary Clinton had the chance to make gay rights history. She refused.” Yet in 2016 when she was campaigning for the Presidency for the second time and the views of wider society had shifted markedly, the LGBT community (as gays had now become) were one of the specific sections of the country whom Clinton claimed to be campaigning especially hard for. It is not unusual for politicians to shift positions. But the speed with which the times changed made for some remarkably sharp changes of position in the political class.

Other people and countries have instituted even swifter and noisier U-turns. Almost immediately after gay marriage became legal in Germany, acceptance of it was made a condition of citizenship in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Yesterday there was one dogma. Now there is another...

In 2018 the MSNBC host Joy Reid was publicly shamed and made to apologize after historic comments from a decade earlier were found in which she had been critical of gay marriage—at a time when almost everybody else was unsupportive of gay marriage as well. When change happens so swiftly, there is much making up for lost time to be done, and little pity for those found dragging behind.

And so some individuals, governments and corporations appear to believe that their job is to make up for lost time. They are forcing discussion of gay issues in a manner slightly beyond acceptance and more in the realms of “This will be good for you.”

By 2018 the BBC seemed to have decided that items of specifically gay news needed to be not just reported but headlined as major news. One of its top stories of the day on the corporation’s website in September that year was that the Olympic diver Tom Daley had felt “inferior” about his sexuality but that this had given him the motivation to become a success. This story was published five years after Daley had come out. He had not been silent about his private life in the interim period. And yet this human interest story was a lead item on the BBC’s website just beneath news of an earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia which had killed more than 800 people. One day later and the BBC website had as one of its lead stories the news that a minor reality television star called Ollie Locke had announced that he and his fiancé (Gareth Locke) were going to join their surnames to make themselves the Locke-Lockes after their forthcoming marriage. In other headline news, the death toll from the Indonesian earthquake had risen significantly overnight.

Perhaps it requires someone who is gay to say this, but there are times when such ‘news’ reporting doesn’t feel like news reporting at all. Rather it seems that some type of message is being sent out either to the public or to people whom the media believe to be in positions of power. This goes beyond “This will be good for you” and nearer to the realm of “See how you like this, bigot.” There are days when you wonder how heterosexuals feel about the growing insistence with which gay stories are crow-barred into any and all areas of news."


LGBT activists: "If you don't let biological men in women's toilets, you're claiming transwomen don't exist"
Also LGBT activists: "Ex-gay people don't exist"

It seems the "gay agenda" really does exist, and so does the slippery slope (despite the usual protestations about the "myth" of the slippery slope). And despite claims to the contrary, promoting homosexuality really is a thing

Liberals' astonishingly radical shift on gender

Liberals' astonishingly radical shift on gender

"[On promoting 'they' as an all-use pronoun] In Manjoo's view, this idea — that the overwhelming majority of people are either men or women and so can be labeled either he or she, him or her, without causing offense or tyrannizing them — is "invisibly stifling" and "sad." Speaking of his own children, Manjoo laments how "silly gender norms" limit "their very liberty" with "little prospect for escape," relegating them to "a ubiquitous prison of the mind" that is "reinforced everywhere, by everyone." Hence the need to work toward "eradicating these distinctions in language" as a first step toward eradicating them "in society." As for the final element in the consensus, it holds that, other than "small-minded grammarians" (more on them below), the only people who would object to such a change in the use of "they" are those who are hopelessly "intolerant."

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to "him" as "he." That's because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as "he" was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn't have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that "gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind" — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class?...

A kind of spiritual-moral madness periodically wells up and sweeps across vast swaths of the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these Great Awakenings were decidedly "low church" affairs and invariably emerged from America's plethora of Protestant sects. Today, for perhaps the first time in American history, it is a nominally secular, progressive elite that finds itself swept up into a moral fervor and eager to overturn (linguistic and other) conventions in a surge of self-certainty and self-righteousness...

In addition to raising a fusty objection to the ungrammatical use of a gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to single, gendered individuals, grammarians might also point out that English is far less gender-infused than many other languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages divide the world into masculine, feminine, and sometimes (but not always) neuter nouns. Masculine chairs, feminine houses, and so on, reflected in definite and indefinite articles and pronouns in every sentence ever read, written, spoken, or heard in languages across the world. Talk about a prison with little prospect for escape!

The comparatively slight fudging of the grammatical rules that Manjoo proposes for American English would be utterly impossible in these other languages, used by many hundreds of millions, without tearing them apart from top to bottom. Looks like Anglo-American culture stands at the forefront of human freedom after all.

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That's more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn't even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which ("the gender binary") go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the writings of a number of thinkers who have analyzed, often critically but from a range of religious and political perspectives, the potential excesses of liberalism and democracy — and especially the antinomian logic of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, Michel Houellebecq, and others have reflected deeply on what might be called the phenomenology of individualism — how a society devoted at the level of principle to the liberation of the individual from constraints can easily produce citizens who continually feel themselves to be newly enslaved and in need of ever new and more radical forms of liberation.

That's because all societies — as collectivities of individuals sharing a common culture as well as common laws, rules, and norms (including linguistic rules and norms) — invariably constrain individuals more than they would be if they lived in absolute isolation from others. Any one of those limits on the individual will can feel as if it's an intolerable constraint, and the principle of individual freedom can always be invoked in order to combat it.

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man's love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian's love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can't just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we're treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that's changed is the object of rebellion."


On the "myth" of the slippery slope - gay marriage being forced through unleashed pronoun/gender madness and trans mania.

Virtue signalling means as each proposition becomes uncontroversial, new and more outlandish propositions need to be sought out and signed up to.

The Slippery Slope: Not a Fallacy - Abortion

The Slippery Slope is widely held to be a fallacy - a product of the fevered imaginations of conservatives who cannot abide the thought of social progress.

Yet, besides the proven cases of concept creep and moral judgments, there are also multiple documented examples of the slippery slope happening (or slipping) in various social domains, such as:

Abortion
Gay marriage
Euthanasia
IVF (New York Times article)

Whether or not one considers these slippery slopes to have been good, i.e. slopes that *should* have slipped, it is incontestable that they indeed did.

In this post I shall provide some material on the slippery slope of abortion. Hopefully in future posts I will follow up on the others (with the exception of IVF, since the NYT has already covered that).

In the United Kingdom, the 1967 Abortion Act allowed abortion if two medical practitioners certified:

(a)that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(b)that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.

In 1974, only 7 years later, Dr John Habgood, the Bishop of Durham and House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics noted that:

The Abortion Act has shown what happens. Whatever the rights and wrongs concerning the present practice of abortion, there is no doubt about two consequences of the 1967 [Abortion] Act:

(a) The safeguards and assurances given when the Bill was passed have to a considerable extent been ignored.

(b) Abortion has now become a live option for anybody who is pregnant. This does not imply that everyone who is facing an unwanted pregnancy automatically attempts to procure an abortion. But because abortion is now on the agenda, the climate of opinion in which such a pregnancy must be faced has radically altered.

Even in 7 years, the slippery slope had already slipped (presciently, Habgood warned of the slippery slope of euthanasia)

In 2008, Lord Steel, who had introduced the 1967 Abortion Act itself, said that abortion was now being used as birth control, and people were being lackadaisical and irresponsible.

Similarly, in 2017, Ann Furedi, the Chief Executive of bpas (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), an independent healthcare charity in the UK, said that:

Abortion is birth control that women need when their regular method lets them down

(Naturally, I've been told that it's a myth that anyone is calling abortion birth control)

And of course today, anyone in the UK proposing to hew to the 1967 Abortion Act (i.e. not having abortion on demand) would be labelled a misogynist who wanted to control women's bodies (with the possible exception of Northern Ireland - though activists are of course unhappy with the status quo there).

Doubtless, this won't stop liberals from mocking people who invoke the very real possibility (perhaps even inevitably) of the slippery slope.

Why the slippery slope happens is an interesting question, and harder to answer than establishing its existence.

In 1972, H. L. A. Hart, who had supported the 1967 Abortion Act which legalised therapeutic abortion, noted that: "its effects had been greatly underestimated by those who brought about the change. What had been envisaged by many as simply a permission, recognising an area of liberty in place of prohibition, had proved to be the introduction of a vast structure of new relationships, institutions, funding, professional obligations, and so forth, involving changes in the ethics, practices, and dispositions of doctors, midwives, social workers, psychiatrists, and people at large" (as paraphrased by Finnis).

More specifically, Finnis notes that medical professioners who had been against the 1967 act "soon became massively opposed to any reform that might slightly reduce the treatment options that had become available to them". To summarise, we could perhaps call this status quo bias (which would explain the stabilisation at each slip, though not further slips).

As for further slips, as previously mentioned, the human brain is wired to find problems. So as each reform is passed, or each change happens, new causes are found and latched on to.

Virtue signalling is another reason - in a related phenomenon to the above, as each proposition becomes uncontroversial, the optical value of holding it goes to zero. So the virtue signaller needs to look for new positions to hold to show how moral or virtuous he is.

Hopefully there will be more research on this in the future.

Concept Creep - the Slippery Slope by another name

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm

"In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”...

Society’s concept of what constituted an unacceptable risk, harm, or trauma expanded for ill. In Hanna Rosin’s words, it “stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer.”...

How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?

The concept of abuse expanded too far...

“The concept of bullying has spread from its original meaning to encompass a wider range of phenomena,” Haslam writes. “It has expanded horizontally into online behavior, into adult workplaces, and into forms of social exclusion that do not directly target the victim with hurtful actions, as distinct from hurtful omissions.” (For example,being excluded from a group of friends is dubbed bullying.)

Bullying has expanded vertically, too.

“Behavior that is less extreme than prototypical bullying now falls within its bounds”...

Trauma originally referred to a physical injury to the body...

By the government’s definition, a Wellesley student who saw that statue of a man in his underwear, perceived the event as “emotionally threatening” and experienced “lasting adverse effects” on her “spiritual well-being” is a trauma victim. Since the same designation also encompasses victims of torture and brutal sexual assaults, and people who experience adverse effects as extreme as suicide, an inevitable effect of this “concept creep” is to leave us without language to distinguish classic trauma, even though isolating such cases might be useful or necessary.

Creep in the concept of “mental disorder” has been much debated in elementary education. Are boys displaying normal restlessness in school classrooms being diagnosed with attention-deficit disorders and medicated so that they’re more sedate for teachers?

“Ordinary vicissitudes of childhood now find shelter under the umbrella concept of mental disorder"...

“By misrepresenting normal sadness, worry, and fear as mental disorders, the mental health professions overmedicate, exaggerate the population prevalence of disorder, and deflect resources away from more severe conditions.”...

The backlash to America’s “ever-increasing sensitivity to harm” is about a lot of diffuse, sometimes contradictory things, but it is partly about an aversion to being scammed...

Within academia, “concept creep” expanded what counted as prejudice “from direct, expressed antipathy...to inferred antipathy,” and then the concept was expanded in two more ways. “The concept of aversive prejudice (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004) applies to liberally minded people who deny personal prejudice but hold aversions, sometimes unconscious, to other-race people,” Haslam writes. “These aversions are not based on hostile antipathy but on fear, unease, or discomfort.” And the idea of implicit bias—that subconscious attitudes and beliefs could shape actions—entrenched the notion that prejudice included negative racial sentiments held by people even if they were unaware of harboring them.

In yet another evolution, prejudice was no longer restricted to negative group evaluations. “The concept of benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996) extended prejudice to include group evaluations that were at least superficially warm and positive,” Haslam writes. “Benevolent sexists idealize women as pure creatures who are too delicate and morally superior to inhabit the hurly-burly public world of men.”

And the concept of prejudice as understood in the academy would not be complete without mentioning the rise of the controversial microaggressions framework...

It seems like there ought to be clearly distinguishable words and concepts for klansmen and demagogues who deliberately stoke racial anxieties, on the one hand, and college students who take a test that suggests that they have mild, negative associations about a racial group, without harboring any animosity toward people in that group, acting badly toward any members of that group, or advocating for anything but full equality on the other. Those college students may be labeled “prejudiced” or “racist,” but few people will be inclined to exclude them from their homes or their workplaces...

“Concept creep” exacerbates failures to communicate.

When a concept is stretched to include “milder, subtler, or less extreme phenomena than those to which they referred at an earlier time,” any earlier judgment or consensus about how best to respond to that concept no longer applies...

Why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?

Haslam endorses two theories.

One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches”... The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”...

“If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives”...

There are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:

“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.”

“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.”

“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.”
.
Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.”...

Greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.

“Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”


So the moral panic and obsession about bullying and mental illness are also the results of concept creep.

Concept creep is a great example of the "fallacy" of the slippery slope.

A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes - the Slippery Slope and Animal Rights

(This was meant to be posted on 22nd September)

Another example of how the slippery slope is not a fallacy:


"The first defense of animal rights came in the form of a joke on human rights. As a reaction against the new ethics of the Enlightenment, a conservative aristocrat ridiculed rights for men and women by arguing that these would eventually lead to the laughable and absurd idea of giving rights to brutes, and perhaps even plants and things. The idea of human rights should thus be abandoned. After two hundred years it is worth revisiting this old argument to address the question of whether granting moral status to animals, plants, and even landscapes eventually makes hard-won human rights into a joke...

Taylor used his knowledge of emblematic natural history to show that animals deserved the same rights as humans. The argument took the idea of exclusive human rights down the slippery slope of the great chain of being from humans (men and women), to animals (elephants, apes, dragons), arriving at the possible rights of vegetables and minerals. The booklet contains page after page of entertaining quotes from ancient sources about elephants conversing with one another and wild dragons having the right to marry and settle in society. It also includes numerous comparisons of women to brutes. Writing under a pseudonym allowed him to play rather freely with the sources. This creative use of evidence permitted laughter, apparently on the idea of granting animal rights, though the target of his joke was Paine and Wollstonecraft’s defense of human rights. This sarcasm was spelled out in the first page of the book. “After the wonderful productions of Mr. Paine and Mrs. Wollstonecraft, such a theory as the present, seems to be necessary, in order to give perfection to our researches into the rights of things.” Taylor’s rhetorical strategy allowed him to attack the idea of human rights, while at the same time retreat by making it clear that he was only joking.

Today the idea of animal rights or liberation is not a joke anymore, and few will find Taylor amusing. His humor was that of an old-fashioned aristocrat failing to see that the world was changing. This at least has been the opinion of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, both who have argued that Taylor’s joke was anything but funny. Indeed Singer began his famous Animal Liberation (1975) by challenging Taylor’s implicit claim that granting rights to brutes was “manifestly absurd...

From a historical perspective Taylor’s reductio ad absurdum of human rights is not absurd, at least if one is to believe Roderick Nash’s history of The Rights of Nature (1989). Nash argues that the evolution of rights of tyrants, Kings, aristocrats, men, women, and blacks is a process which will continue with rights for animals, species, and perhaps whole landscapes. To many activists of the 1970s this gradual historical evolution of rights was a matter of personal experience emerging from their involvement in the Civil Rights and feminist movements. This modern and progressive view of history as a linear development of moral standings from humans, to animals, birds, fish, insects, plants, and ecological communities has prevailed in much environmental philosophy. As a result, arguments in favor of exclusive human rights have been portrayed, at least in the writings of Nash, as backward looking. Progressive environmental ethicists have consequently been struggling with the problem of trying to draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the fortunate group of beings in the moral community...

The aim of Taylor’s satirical defense of animal rights on biocentric grounds was to undermine the emerging notion of human rights and thus secure his own aristocratic privileges. The aim of current biocentric environmental ethics is also to undermine the anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment, which raises the question of whose human interest this ethic will serve. In the aristocratic world of Taylor, it was up to the King, Prince or Duke to determine the hierarchy of rights in society. In the world imagined by animal rights groups and environmental ethicists, rights will ultimately be determined by expert zoologists and ecologists with intimate knowledge of species and landscapes. Scientists will be the ones settling rights and privileges within the biotic community. In the case of Deep Ecology, for example, the ecologists will in effect be nature’s aristocrats laying out the rules of the game.

Taylor’s old pamphlet also provokes the question of whether or not animal rights, and by extension, rights of the rest of the natural world, may turn human rights into a joke. It is not clear how one is supposed to defend hard-won human rights in a world where moral status is a privilege of every species. If everything is entitled to rights then no one will end up respecting them, since breaking these rights would be inevitable in order to survive. A vindication of the rights of brutes risks vindicating human brutes. A world without boundaries would allow any type of action, since there would be no demarcation between right and wrong. A return to anthropocentrism, on the other hand, does not imply an endorsement of cruelty to animals or environmental destruction. As indicated above, to damage anything beautiful would undermine the human moral sensibility Kant thought was of paramount importance. The defense of human rights implied a moral duty to not harm nature because that would undermine human dignity."

--- A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes / Peder Anker

Past material on slippery slopes in action

The Failure of Liberal Bioethics - NYTimes.com - on IVF and other related technologies

Gay marriage:
The slippery slope of gay marriage has begun - On Utah's anti-polygamy law being struck down due to gay marriage being legal (and more of gay marriage's own slippery slope)

The Volokh Conspiracy - The Slippery Slope to Same-Sex Marriage - On gay marriage and past claims that there would be no slippery slope towards it

Addendum: Gay marriage and the immediate pivot to trans 'rights' are another example of the 'myth' of the slippery slope (Google isn't indexing that page for some reason)

Euthanasia:
Legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide: the illusion of safeguards and controls

Euthanasia and the Slippery Slope (links)