Dignity Requires Nude Panhandling, Infanticide, Homosexual Marriage, Etc.

Natural Naked Human Dignity

This NYT article uncovers New York City's legal inability to ban women from begging for money by publicly displaying their naked bodies to strangers for lewd pictures. It also offers a peep into the undressed state of U.S. jurisprudence. Revealingly, as with abortion and legalized sodomy, these women's right to display themselves in Times Square is supposedly based on the need to protect their human dignity. (I wrote earlier on the legal theology of clothes here; in sum, the social practice of wearing clothing displays an understanding of man's sin and need for covering, nudism a cultivated denial of man's sinfulness and sartorial dandyism a cultivated denial of man's need for God to clothe us. A society that cannot enforce the basic requirement of self-covering is literally shameless and lacking in the basic moral equipment for civilized life.)

If you don't understand how New York could be required to permit public nudity for panhandling, you haven't learned what our judicial rulers, especially Justice Kennedy, have decreed about human dignity recently. In Casey, Kennedy explained to us that women are dignified by choosing to cut and crush their own babies in their own bodies. In Lawrence, he showed why men are dignified in being sodomized. In Obergefell, he held human dignity required equal treatment for male-male "marriage" and real matrimony.

Knowledge of Good and Evil Will Make You More Dignified

Let me unclothe Kennedy's kind of reasoning further. As Satan and Kennedy teach, since man is dignified in his own nature, in himself, then he is dignified whatever he does. Indeed, he is dignified precisely by being himself. Man is, therefore, more dignified when he chooses for himself without constraint, without consideration for what is not himself. Our dignity does not require us to act in obedience to God; our dignity requires only knowledge of both good and evil, choosing freely between things. We become like God not by participating in His Goodness but by asserting our freedom to choose good or evil indifferently. 

Whether he has chosen to expose himself, to lie with a man as with a woman, to rut, to gorge, to corrupt himself, to mock modesty or to leer at beauty, man is still man, still dignified in his nature by the act of choice. Man has an innate dignity, not exclusively arising from his potential for good, but grounded in his freedom to do anything.

Human dignity comes from the freedom to choose, not from what is chosen. Whether a woman chooses to protect her baby or kill her baby, what matters is that she chooses. Whether a woman chooses to clothe herself or bare herself, what matters is choice. This is the decreed, degenerate dignity of American jurisprudence.

This vision of human dignity, the basis of our culture of legalized infanticide and homosexual unions, also explains why N.Y. can't prohibit women from exposing their bodies in Times Square. Of course, women displaying their bodies to panhandle is a minor problem compared with the others. But it is a better public symbol of American jurisprudence because nude panhandling is on view in Times Square.