Raptum Omnium Ab Omnibus

 

The late Lawrence Auster, who passed away in March of 2013, was a huge inspiration to the generation – in a rather loose sense of the word – of writers who started blogging in the years when he was active at  View From the Right and who, like himself, were theologically conservative Christians and political “conservatives” in the “traditionalist” sense of the word who espoused views on race, immigration, sex, and gender that would have been well within the mainstream sixty years ago but are now considered to be beyond the pale on the right wing of the political spectrum.    This would include, among many others, Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife, the contributors to The Orthosphere, and this writer.

 

On April 21^st, 2009 he re-posted a comment from a post at Dennis Mangan’s blog and the thread that followed as “The Next Frontier of Non-Discrimination: Obligatory Interracial Dating”.    I’m not sure, upon re-reading the post after all this time, how much of the discussion was carried over from Mangan’s blog, which is no longer around to check, and how much was original to Mr. Auster’s, but it is not important.    The original comment linked to a Youtube video in which University of Delaware students were quizzed as to their willingness to date blacks and Muslims for the purpose of determining how “racist” they were.    The point was that liberal anti-racism was moving from condemning opposition to interracial dating as “racist” to condemning a lack of interest in participating in it oneself as “racist” and thus making interracial dating socially obligatory, hence Mr. Auster’s title.   About half way through the discussion someone who went by the handle “LL” asked Mr. Auster about whether it follows from this revised liberalism that to “eschew same-sex dating” is homophobic.    He answered in the affirmative, saying that this was precisely the direction in which liberalism was leading.    Pointing to how liberals were using previous bans on interracial marriage as part of their argument for same-sex marriage, he said “So if there’s no moral difference between a black and a white marrying each other and a man and a man – or a woman and a woman – marrying each other, there would not seem to be any moral difference between requiring a white student to date a nonwhite student (as some schools are apparently now doing) and requiring a male student to date a male student.”   The last comment in the post was by Lydia McGrew of What’s Wrong With the World and was about how pressure on heterosexuals to date members of the same-sex already existed in some women’s studies classes.

 

This whole idea that liberals’ own internal logic placed them on a trajectory that led from demanding tolerance of non-traditional relationships, to demanding acceptance of the same, to demanding participation in them, was one that Mr. Auster revisited several times.  I thought, and still think, that he was right about this and picked up the theme myself after he passed away.    A few years later, I wrote an essay that started with the hypothetical scenario of someone who politely rejected the advances of a member of the same sex being slapped with a discrimination suit, which he lost and found himself facing cripplingly punitive fines, and from this scenario reasoned towards the ethical conclusion that discrimination qua discrimination was not inherently wrong and that anti-discrimination laws, that is to say, laws that prohibit private persons from discriminating are fundamentally unjust.    Shortly after this, a judge ruled against the Christian dating site Christian Mingle in a discrimination lawsuit, and ordered them to expand their options from “men seeking women” and “women seeking men”.   While the court order did not compel individual men and women to date members of their own sex it was a large step in that direction in that it set the precedent that the realm of dating and relationships was now subject to anti-discrimination law.    In commenting on this at the time, I said that we were rapidly heading towards mandatory obligatory omnisexuality, which I described as a raptum omnium ab omnibus (“rape of all by all”) which expression, obviously, I borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of human existence outside of civilized society and its laws as a bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”).

 

 

Who would have thought at the time that five years later a radically different situation would develop which could also be aptly described with this same expression?

 

I am referring, of course, to the forced vaccination that is the latest episode in the ongoing bat flu saga.

 

Let us consider the component parts of the expression, beginning with raptum, which would usually be translated abduction but which I am using here in the sense of its English derivative, rape.

 

To call forced vaccination rape is to use this word in a sense that is only slightly less than literal.  In the most literal sense of the word to rape is to force someone to have sexual intercourse with you against that person’s will.   Apart from instances of statutory rape involving an adult woman and a minor in which the minor is unable to legally consent due to age, this almost always means a male forcibly penetrating somebody else.   This is due to basic biology – even if you have a female who is sufficiently larger and stronger than a male to try and force herself upon him in this manner, to succeed would require that his body co-operate in a wayr in which it is noted to fail even when its cooperation is wanted by the male and under the set of circumstances when it is least likely to do so.    Therefore, for all intents and purposes, rape can be said to be forced penetration.    Forced vaccination is forced penetration, albeit with a needle rather than a penis.   To the wiseacres who think that talking about the bees and mosquitos who “raped” them is a witty comeback to this, note that mens rea, which can only be present in those with human moral agency, is a necessary component of any crime.   Insects do not and cannot possess mens rea, humans who compel other people to be injected with substances that they do not want to be injected with, have it in spades.

 

Should, however, anyone still object on the ground that rape is essentially sexual in nature, I shall answer neither by suggesting, however plausibly, that those who are so insistent that everyone who does not want the bat flu vaccine be compelled to take it derive some erotic thrill from this, nor by making reference to the common feminist trope that rape is about power not sex, but by offering an alternative comparison.   Imagine the government telling everybody that they need to have two injections of heroin, and possibly a booster injection of heroin at a later date, issuing heroin passports to confirm that people have had their required doses, banning people from bars, restaurants, movie theatres, concerts and sporting events unless they can prove they have had their heroin shots, and requiring all public employees and all people employed, whether publicly or privately, in certain sectors, to take their heroin shots as a condition of their continuing employment.    This would be considered by pretty much everybody to be a heinous crime against humanity.   The analogy here is exact, with the only difference being the contents of the needle.    The heinousness of forced heroin injection, however, does not lie solely in the heroin itself, but rather permeates the entire act.

 

The omnium, meaning “of all”, requires little in the way of commentary.    The fact that these vaccine passport and mandate measures have generally been introduced after a sizeable portion of the population has already been voluntarily vaccinated shows that nothing short of 100% vaccination will satisfy those insisting upon such extreme measures, which in turn demonstrates just how irrational these people are. 

 

The ab omnibus, which means “by all” is appropriate here because of the broad support these vaccine passports and mandates seem to have.   If the numbers on the matter are at all credible, vaccine passports and mandates have far more supporters than lockdowns and mandatory masks did.   The explanation for this is that the number of those who supported lockdowns and masks but feel that forced vaccination is a step too far is much lower than the number of those who opposed lockdowns and masks and who see the vaccines as a means of escaping these things.    This was inevitable, I suppose.   Once someone has accepted suspending everybody’s basic and constitutional rights and freedoms, imposing quarantine on the entire healthy population, ordering people to close their businesses based on an arbitrary classification of “essential” and “non-essential”, and the like as acceptable means of slowing the spread of a novel respiratory disease that those who are young and healthy have over a 99% chance of surviving he does not have much further to go to accepting forced injections.   Such a person is not likely to understand that holding the rights and freedoms that the government stole from us hostage is not morally different from holding a gun to our heads as a means of persuading us to get vaccinated.   Meanwhile, two years of lockdowns and masks have tired many out, wearing away at their moral resolve so that those willing to resist the vaccine mandates are fewer in number than those who opposed the earlier measures.

 

This is most unfortunate since forced vaccination is, in reality, an escalation of the tyranny of the last two years, not an escape from it.   Do we want to live in a society where we can be compelled to be injected with substances without our informed and voluntary consent?   Do we want to live in a society where we can be required to show our “papers” wherever we go?   Do we want future generations to have to live in such a society?

 

If our answer to any or all of these questions is no, then regardless of what we may think about the vaccines qua vaccines, or whether we ourselves have been vaccinated, partially or fully, or not, we must fervently oppose and reject this raptum omnium ab omnibus now.