I’d love to know who suggested this was even something a person of sound mind should consider. What, exactly, is ‘deviance’?

I’m reminded of the law they used to have in Kansas which prohibited an unnatural act against man and/or beast, without actually bothering to specify which unnatural act they were talking about. As Bill Bryson commented, does this mean heavy logging in the rainforest? Whipping your mule?

I frankly hope I never live to see a ‘law against deviance’ passed. I have little enough faith in the legal system as it is without them resorting to wooly headed, populist thinking like this.

And even if, hypothetically, something as moronic of this made it into the legislative process, who gets to decide what’s ‘deviant’, exactly? By definition, ‘deviant’ would mean any behaviour which differs from that of the majority. The divorce rate for people on their second marriage in the US is 60%. Does this mean anyone on their second marriage would be required to divorce, or be charged with being a deviant?

Presuming that whoever mashed keys semi-randomly and came up with this topic to start with meant ‘sexual deviancy’, how do we decide what’s deviant? There’s still states in the US where oral sex is deemed illegal. In Texas, you can’t buy a dildo unless it’s for ‘instructional purposes’, but you can happily buy yourself a full body leather gimp suit.

This kind of thinking is what’s crippling the United States today. It’s the kind of thinking that turns voting a black man into office into an enormous brouhaha, while the the rest of the western world looks on and chuckles indulgently. It’s the sort of thinking which tolerates right-wing churches desecrating the graves of soldiers who were gay. It’s the sort of thinking that gets the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools prohibited, relying instead on fables from bronze-age sheepherders to prepare our children for the future. It’s the sort of thinking that dismisses global warming as a fallacy, or allows people to claim millions of Jews weren’t massacred last century, and actually have people take them seriously.

In short, it’s the kind of thinking which doesn’t require any thinking at all. It’s a knee-jerk reactionary response to anything that appears to threaten the status quo. And sadly, it’s becoming more and more popular as the years go on. Eric Blair must be spinning in his grave - he predicted a society where the masses not only didn’t know what was going on in the world around them, they didn’t care either. They can be given false targets to vilify, while actual, genuine atrocities occur right under their noses.