Posted on 05/17/2008 11:12:16 AM PDT by Graybeard58
People gaze in disbelief at the cultural landscape — all the divorce, cohabitation, promiscuity, sexually transmitted disease, single moms, ill-mannered children, failing public schools, substance abuse, domestic violence, abortions, pornography and incivility — and can't fathom how America fell this far this fast.
No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society's widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.
Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.
At every step of this long downward cultural march were men and women in black robes, activist judges eager to take out another of society's underpinnings under the guise of some spurious, high-sounding goal. And at every step, relativists declared that the latest judicial fiat freeing another genie of man's worst impulses would, inexplicably, make society stronger, fairer, safer, better.
Thursday's California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage followed the script, but was at best redundant — its Massachusetts counterpart broke this ground four years ago with the identical one-vote margin — and was more symbolic than significant. Homosexuals already enjoy all of the rights and benefits of traditional marriage under California law, which treats homosexuality and heterosexuality as functional equivalents.
No, the ruling merely answered homosexuals' purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label — "marriage" — the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned. Far from being a seminal ruling, the decision merely inched the homosexual agenda ahead and drove yet another nail in the culture's coffin.
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Bump
I’m beginning to think that gubberment involvment in marriage was a tremendous mistake. I mean, is anybody shocked that gubberment eventually messed marriage up? It’s not like it’s got a stellar track record with any thing else.
Freegards
A few years back I too thought there would be a revolution.
Over the past months two things have happened that cause me to revisit my thinking on this. I will list the most important one first.
1. Each year more people are becomming more and more willing to sell their birthright[Freedom] to the government in return for “free” things from the government. At this thim it is free “health care”. Who knows what it will be tomorrow. The point is that they care nothing for their freedom. They prefer govermental chains to independence and self sufficency.
2. Each year a number of the people who cherished their freedoms die and are not replaced. They are being replaced by those who prefer govermental slaverey over freedom.
3. I know i listed two and this is the third but its imporance ranks with number one. The youth of this Country are not reared to:a) Understand and appreciate the Constitution of the United States. b)Appreciate what it means to be an American Citizen. c) Respect for the Founding Fathers of the United States. d)Not taught to love the United States.
Where I attended school this was drilled into us by the teachers from the first to tewlth day one way or the other on a daily basis.
Judging from what I have seen over the past few years, freedom in the United States will end with a whisper instead of a bang
“I agree with you up to a point, but the work of Alfred Kinsey and the development of the birth control pill both preceded the hippies. Actually, the roaring 20s were one of the earlier signs that we were on the precipice of our downward moral spiral. All of it adds up to where we are now.”
I believe it started a long time before that, with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century. When you read about what some people did then, like Ben Franklin having an illegitimate son and feeling no shame, it is shocking.
The problem began when America lost its Puritan roots. We should go back to our tradition of the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and G-d’s laws in our heart.
Or, perhaps it started with the Civil War. There is plenty of evidence of young men who had never been farther than 5 or 10 miles from their homes being corrupted by the prostitutes of Washington, Chicago, Charleston, Richmond and other cities.
That was followed by the traditional American West with the saloon girl and brothels we see in movies today. Even a someone like Wyatt Earp (a famous “hero”), could marry a prostitute and openly live with a woman who was not his wife.
And then WWI, the jazz age and flappers, and WWII led to a further decline in morals, until today, “Anything goes,” (by Cole Porter, a homosexual, published in 1934).
Yes, the roots of today’s immorality go all the way back to the founding of America, and perhaps before that, It’s gonna be a big job to change it, but let’s give it a try.
Urban populations had other problems ~ there, traditionally, adults could survive well but the children would die. It was common for wealthy urbanites to send their children to the country to grow up.
Industrialization, water purification systems, and modern medicine helped reverse the situation. Today the rural poor die while the cities are far healthier for everyone.
The error in your response to my post is that you selected mostly urban, or substantially urban residents. For their periods of time they were not typical of the bulk of the population that lived in a rural environment and suffered rural illnesses.
“Half a dozen wives was not at all unusual ~ particularly in rural areas where death in childbirth was exceedingly common.”
This is a pointless discussion, but I will point out that Washington, Jefferson and Jackson were all farmers.
You might have made a better case if you had based your criticism on class rather than location.
No, it's not pointless. I'm simply pointing out what my experience with genealogical research in the extant records of the 1700s and early 1800s has shown.
You'll notice that I didn't say the average guy had half a dozen wives, just that it was common ~ more common than today in fact.
BTW, it was even worse in the Middle Ages.
This happened every year regular as clockwork.
They weren't the only people to do that.
BTW, not everybody made it back from the long hunt, and not all the women lived through brutal winters.
The farther you get away from God, the more preblems you have. Leftist doctrine as a substitute for God is only destroying America.
“...Yes, the roots of today’s immorality go all the way back to the founding of America, and perhaps before that, It’s gonna be a big job to change it, but let’s give it a try.”
I detect, shall we say, some sarcasm in your post. Vice has always existed and always will. The difference between now and then is that the boundaries in the past were far more clear. People strayed, but when they did, they knew they’d stepped over those clearly defined boundaries. If Benjamin Franklin had an illegitimate child, everyone understood that this was wrong. People did not shrug it off as something that everyone did.
A number of people today are relativistic and do not believe that there is such a thing as right and wrong, except as the individual defines it at any given moment. (I am not Christian, by the way.) The effects of this can be illustrated by the following. A professor who had gone to high school in the 1950s told me that kids then were concerned with running in the hallways, spit balls and talking in class. When I went to high school in the 1960s, out of a class of around 350 kids, maybe about 4 were experimenting with marijuana. They were the “far out” kids. Nobody got pregnant. The issue of guns and knives never even came up. I only know of one girl whose parents were divorcing, and even though her behavior was not that good, a lot of people sympathized with her because of the stress of the divorce.
Today, kids are concerned with STDs, including HIV/AIDS, being shot and drug and alcohol addiction. There is no comparison between this and issues with spit balls, running in the hallway and talking in class.
Tradition instructs us to disapprove of vice because some short-term thrill leads to unhappy long-term results. We reduce the probability of vice by disapproving of it, and if that strikes you as being overly Puritanical, so be it.
“We are a bunch of sheep being hypmotized slowly but surely.”
Then surrender. You will have many beside you when you do. But I won’t be one of them.
Me? When freedom is at stake I don’t believe in surrenders.
Some folks may just laugh at this matter but the real serious implications may include civil unrest and the fracture of a nation.
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