Damon Linker of The Week is “baffled.”

Having read several of his previous op-ed pieces, I have to say this is nothing new for Linker, but in this case, he himself is the one calling attention to just how very baffled he is.

What Linker is befuddled by is a long interview piece in New York magazine called “What it’s Like to Date a Horse.”

It seems Linker isn’t so much perplexed by bestiality itself, but by the fact that bestiality no longer seems to be something that grosses out everybody else as much as it does Linker.

He assures us the New York piece, and the greater moral paradigm-shift it represents (in his mind, at least) “is a very big deal, in cultural and moral terms.”

Beyond that bare assertion, however, Linker seems to have a tough time explaining why it’s a “very big deal.”

“Am I worried that large numbers of people will soon choose to shack up with their pets or farm animals?” Linker asked, rhetorically. “Not at all. I can’t imagine that very many people will ever be drawn to bestiality, no matter how casually it is treated in the media.”

Me neither. In fact, I’m pretty sure the vast, vast majority of humanity will never[FONT=Times New Roman]—[/FONT]not even once[FONT=Times New Roman]—[/FONT]fuck a horse.

Speaking for myself, I can say I’m not even a little curious about what it’s like to fuck a horse, a German Shepherd or a Carolina Panthers fan.

So, now we know Linker is not worried about horse-fucking becoming the hottest thing since the “Aniston Cut” hairstyle. What is he worried about?

The New York interview, Linker wrote, “stands as a stunning testament to our ignorance about ourselves.

“Roughly 2,500 years since Socrates first raised the question of how we should live, several centuries since the Enlightenment encouraged us to seek and promulgate scientific knowledge about the universe and human nature, Western humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that we haven’t got a clue about an answer. There is no consensus whatsoever about what ways of life are intrinsically good or bad for human beings.”

He got all of that from an interview with a horse-fucker?

To Linker, the New York horse-fucker interview is just the tip of an iceberg of moral uncertainty, a glowing, bestial symbol of our general inclination not to take a stand on the rightness or wrongness of anything.

“Get married and have kids? If that’s what you want, sounds good,” Linker wrote. “Live in a polyamorous arrangement? As long as everyone consents, have fun. What about my intense desire to copulate with a horse? Just make sure no one gets hurt[FONT=Times New Roman]—[/FONT]with hurt defined in the narrowest of terms (covering physical harm and the violation of personal preferences).”

Linker asserts such equivocation is “all we’ve got…or all we’re left with, now that we’ve shed the [ostensibly] discredited notions of human virtue that most people once affirmed.”

The real problem here, I think, is that Linker is worried this modern world leaves him with no room to be harshly critical of horse-fuckers[FONT=Times New Roman]—[/FONT]and others who come up short based on his personal moral yardstick, one assumes.

I think this is why Linker has such a hard time coming to an actual fucking point in this equivocating, vague, fretting-about-nothing-in-particular opinion piece: He’s not so much concerned about the immorality of others, but worried he’ll soon be in the minority by considering anything to be immoral.

You know what? I don’t give a shit, because I have no respect for cowards and I find intellectual cowardice to be the most repulsive form of spinelessness.

If you think something is morally wrong, it shouldn’t matter whether the bulk of society agrees with you. You are either the kind of person who stands up for what he believes is right, or you aren’t.

If you need the (pun intended) “moral support” of your peers in order to speak your mind about what you believe to be right or wrong, then do us all a favor: Suck it up, keep your mouth shut and find something to write about in which you do have the confidence to express an actual opinion.

Writing vague little columns in which you toy with the idea of strongly condemning bestiality, and/or some (alleged) societal tolerance of bestiality, but never really come right out and say “I believe it is wrong to fuck a horse, and I think it’s a moral failure on the part of everybody else not to say so” is just useless.

And speaking of useless…. As rhetorical devices go, failing to answer in any real way the rhetorical questions you pose in your own article fits the definition of that term quite nicely.

“Is that good enough? Can we do without a publicly affirmed vision of human flourishing, or will a world that tells us in a million ways that we are radically undetermined in our ends leave us feeling empty, lost, alone, unmoored, at sea, spiritually adrift?” Linker asked.

Spoiler alert: He doesn’t know.

“I have no idea.”

See? I told you.

“But I suspect we’re going to find out soon enough.”

How cryptic! How downright enigmatic!

And how utterly fucking useless.