Morailty, Ethics, and Some Common Sense

We'd have left this one well enough alone, but a couple of regular haunts seem to have missed the point.
So I think it's time to take a whack at it.
So to speak.

(NYFC Post) Many members of what’s widely known as the kink community are outraged that Eric Schneiderman, in resigning as New York’s attorney general, depicted his alleged violence toward several women as “role-playing and other consensual sexual activity.”

Aficionados of kinky sex noted that Schneiderman’s accusers insisted they had given no consent — which is considered obligatory among most practitioners of kink.

Peter, at Bayou Renaissance Man writes in reply

I'm afraid the concerns of the BDSM community leave me cold.  Instead of worrying about bad publicity, perhaps its members should instead consider the state of their psychological and psychiatric health.  Anyone who enjoys inflicting or receiving pain, and advocates for that to be both tolerated and encouraged, has forfeited my sympathy entirely.  I've seen too many examples of rape, torture and violence to be under any illusions about the reality of pain.  Consent is irrelevant.  Anyone who's volunteered at a shelter for battered women and children, or had to deal with the reality and tragic aftermath of child abuse, knows exactly what I mean.

That's going about a country mile too far, methinks.

Thoughtful folks of religious, or merely open-minded bent, should read, for instance, Philip Yancey's Intervarsity Press book, The Gift of Pain, and re-think such a position.

Sticking your foot into a slightly too-warm bath is absolutely "painful", frequently in an oh-so-wonderful way, but it is not, ergo, hitting your spouse in the mouth with a pipe wrench and knocking out all her teeth.
(That's also precisely the sort of concrete-headed idiocy, zero-IQ, zero-tolerance nonsense we get from PETA when they tell us "A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy".)

There are people who go through life without pain.
It's called Hansen's Disease.
You probably know it better by its biblical name: Leprosy.

All pain is not evil; it does, in fact, serve a vital and life-saving function, and not always in a bad way. It's why our hands tell us the stove is hot, broken bones hurt, and why our parents may have had cause to use the Board Of Education on us a time or two, going back to at least Socrates or so.

But perhaps those coming at this from a more religious perspective ought to do a study on the number of times "chastening" comes up in Old and New Testaments, and get back to us on that thought, for example. "Whom the Lord loveth, he  __________" something-or-other, right?

Consent, IIRC, doesn't even enter into it at that point, does it?
And certainly the Almighty is not a rapist...?
So things are perhaps quite a bit less black-and-white than some would like them to be.

Some people play football, rugby, or hockey, but no one (no one sane, anyways) argues they should all be locked up for brutality, or rampant sadomasochism, so coming down so knee-jerk on another group with a different idea of what is and isn't "play" is beyond narrow-minded, and if someone can't see the difference between their practices and what the NY AG is accused of, I think perhaps their eyes are closed a bit too tightly.

No one, least of all the folks in that article, are asking anyone to adopt their outlook or proclivities (thank heavens), merely to assent to the reality that Schneiderman trying to excuse actual non-consensual physical abuse, and paint it as "just kinky behavior", is straining at the bounds of rational thought, the English language, and sanity. And not to put too fine a point on it, but also the penal code of the state of New York.

And the twit that wrote the earlier twaddle I've seen on the subject should have known better as well, and closed his yawp before attempting some more sober reflection.

The offense being committed in that piece is the same sort of soft-headed insanity that conflates looking at a pretty girl as "eye-rape", deserving the full judicial punishments with all the penitentiary trimmings.

We call people who can't tell a baby from the bath water lunatics for a reason.

Let us not be in such haste to move away from people whose practices we regard with distaste, that we flee common sense entirely, and throw ourselves off the Cliffs of Insanity.

Reality doesn't care about how we feel about it, and the "kink community" is both rationally right, and rightfully outraged at being dragooned in as a scapegoat for his crimes:
Schneiderman's trying to drag them under the bus, and pass off his crimes as "kink".

If Schneiderman actually did what is alleged, it wasn't kink, and he ought to be horsewhipped.
And no safeword.