The always informative Crooked Timber has recently had a series of posts defending same-sex marriage from a series of badly argued posts over at Volokh. They continue with this amusing (in a don’t-know-if-I-should-laugh-or-cry kind of way) post on th…

If you’re looking for adventure of a
new and different kind,
And you come across a Girl Scout who is
similarly inclined,
Don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared.
Be prepared!

If the US does as badly as that, we can expect the successor state to take over sometime between 2217 and 3260.

But, as Peggy Noonan once remarked, it would be irresponsible not to speculate!

Here in the US we are up to Episode 8 already, and as soon as the series finishes, I’ll be sure to post and tell everybody The Answer, which I have no doubt will be provided for us. Vividly. (I’ll head the piece “SPOILER” for those who don’t want to know whether Rome fell or not until they see it themselves.) (I hope I’m not spoiling it for anyone when I say that in Episode #1 Polly Walker looks absolutely amazing with her kit off. Vividly so.)

Meanwhile, however, I try to evoke the gravitas of a Presidential (or Imperial?) spokesman in saying: “While the investigation is continuing, it would be premature to speculate about this matter.”

No, we’re in the middle of an huge and only partly acknowledged crisis in the right-wing inability to think logically, to filter out their psychosexual and racial projections, to check their assertions, and to write decent prose.

In fact, the Roman empire may have fallen due to excessively “organized” sexuality, if by that Gallagher means heterosexual reproduction. Bruce Frier, an expert on Roman demography, has advanced the argument that in the first two centuries of our era, the population increased up to carrying capacity (given constraints of ancient agriculture).

What demographers euphemistically call “demographic contraction” ensued, from a plague in the 160s (maybe smallpox), chronic civil warfare in the third century AD, and eventually the barbarian invasions (which began in the third century—Goths in the Black Sea region). The government, as said upthread, put more and more demands on a shrinking base.

The Western empire eventually couldn’t handle it. The Byzantine East, more urbanized and wealthier, remained intact much longer (it remained a political entity even after Egypt and the Near East were lost to the Arabs)

Gallagher also assumes that homosexual activities would preclude hetero reproduction, which is not the case at all; even ancient Greek pederastic lovers were expected to marry women and produce children.

I’ll leave it to the classicists to work out how Cicero managed to anticipate such concepts as budgets, public debt and bankruptcy.

DSW

I would also like to apologize to Romulus Augustulus, but I can’t because he’s dead.
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She didn’t!

She did?

A “Rome ‘fell’ because of [stuff I want to bitch about anyway]” argument?

How pathetic is that? Why is it that when conservatives try to go all armchair and calabash on an issue (that they’ve never bothered to study) they wind up striking only as high as the seventh-grade Asperger syndrome kid with the post-nasal drip?

Tell me when Rome “fell.” I need a good laugh!

We already have a war built on cartoonish notions of WOGs. We don’t need a social policy built on cartoons involving togas. So take your cold-fusion economics and your bone-in-the-nose creationism and kindly stay the fuck out of the way of thinking people.
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Not encouraging, I know.

Cod.Theod. IX. Vii. 6: All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man’s body, acting the part of a woman’s to the sufferance of alien sex (for they appear not to be different from women), shall expiate a crime of this kind in avenging flames in the sight of the people.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/just-novels.html

Given Roman progress before and after the advent of Christianity, it would seem the more ‘sexual disorganisation’ the better.

But the correlation with the spread of Christianity inside the Empire is too good to let go of.