Remember when the liberal slogan was "keep the government out of the bedroom"?

Good times, good times...

Liberals storm California bedrooms with new "consent law."

I have a slightly different take on California’s recent decision to regulate college sex. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s beyond idiotic, unworkable, even borderline Orwellian. We’ll get to all that.

But I also think it’s incredibly useful. You see, for years I’ve been railing and ranting about the ridiculous myth that liberalism is socially libertarian; that liberals are “live and let live” types simply defending themselves against judgmental conservatives, the real aggressors in the culture war. 

That thinking runs counter to most everything liberals justifiably take pride in as liberals. You can’t be “agents for change,” “forces for progress,” or whatever the current phrase is, and simultaneously deny that you’re the aggressors in the culture war. For instance, just in the last decade, liberals have redefined a millennia-old understanding of marriage while talking as if it were conservatives who wanted to “impose” their values on the nation.

Most libertarians are surely against racial discrimination, sexism, poor eating habits, homophobia, and so on. But their proposed remedies don’t look anything like a liberal’s. Libertarians, for the most part, do not favor racial or gender quotas. They’re against banning big sodas, campus speech codes, or forcing elderly nuns to pay for birth-control coverage, among other things.

Liberals, meanwhile, are quite open about their desire to use the state to impose their morality on others. Many conservatives want to do likewise, of course. The difference is that when conservatives try to do it, liberals are quick to charge “theocracy!” and decry the Orwellian horror.

Enter California governor Jerry Brown, whose answer to the alleged “rape epidemic” on campuses was to sign the new “affirmative consent” law. It will require a verbal “yes” at every stage of amorous activity on college campuses.