IN THE LAME DUCK CONGRESS, the forces of the left were unable to
raise tax rates on “the rich.” They will stay unchanged for two
more years. But the left was able to overturn “don’t ask, don’t
tell,” the law circumscribing speech affecting homosexuals in the
military.
There’s a pattern here. Conservatives prevail when the economy
is the issue (I omit Obamacare, which if not overturned will
deliver a serious blow to the economy). But we lose when it comes
to what used to be called “social issues.” It seems conservatives
have lost every culture-war battle since the contraceptive pill was
introduced 50 years ago.
Here is a brief, recent history:
1. Speaking at the GOP convention in 1992, when George Bush Sr.
was nominated, Pat Buchanan reported that we were in a “cultural
war.” He mentioned women in combat as something that should be
resisted.
2. He was immediately accused of declaring a culture
war. He was identified as an aggressor for noticing the assault
that was under way.
3. Irving Kristol, the conservative commentator who died in
2009, said in 2001: “We in America fought a culture war and we
lost.”
4. Last November, the Family Research Council, a group in
Washington that continues to mount rearguard actions in the culture
war, was called a “hate group.” The accusation came from the
Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that itself bristles with hate
— hatred of the normal.
The real target of the culture war is the Judeo-Christian
orthodoxy that prevailed in Western culture for millennia — until
recently. Orthodox Jews and a Catholic remnant are its principal
upholders today. The Episcopalians and other major Protestant
denominations have surrendered and in many instances have become
culture warriors themselves — opposing what they once supported.
It’s the same for Jews of the “reformed” congregation, or of
none.
Culture war issues cluster around sex, gender, and marriage.
Monogamous marriage without divorce, without premarital sex,
contraception, or abortion, is the standard under massive
attack.
Recently the Family Research Council issued an “Index of
Belonging and Rejection,” based on 2008 Census data. It shows the
percentage of American children who grow up in intact homes, with
both birth mother and biological father legally married to one
another until the child becomes a teenager.
Broken down by region and racial and ethnic groups, the figures
are shocking. Nationwide, only 45 percent of youths grow up with
both parents. For whites it’s 54 percent. Blacks are down to 17
percent. Asian Americans are doing best, at 62 percent. The
out-of-wedlock birthrate for blacks was 26 percent in 1965 when
Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified the problem and was promptly
accused of racism for his pains. Today the out-of-wedlock birthrate
for blacks is 72 percent. It’s 28 percent for whites and 40 percent
for the nation as a whole. (The white illegitimacy rate was 3
percent in 1965.)
Do we wonder about the rise of Islam? Look no further than the
catastrophic effects of the culture war in the Western world.
Basically it’s a war against God. Another front in this war is the
legalization of assisted suicide.
We are living in the midst of a revolution that few want to talk
about even though, if not reversed, it will spell the end of
Western Civilization. Accompanying this revolution has been the
collapse of fertility rates, especially in Europe. This demographic
revolution, aided by contracep-tion and abortion, ensures that
income transfer programs will not be sustainable for much longer —
perhaps no more than another 10 years in Europe. Only the
immigration to the U.S. of more fertile Latinos has postponed (but
has not averted) the same outcome here.
There is little discussion of these issues in the press. The
Wall Street Journal keeps a weather eye out for
approaching economic icebergs but has little to say about the
culture war and its implications. But economy and culture can’t be
kept separate for long. When children grow up without fathers,
taxpayers foot the bill, girls grow up to imitate their mothers,
and the boys join gangs and in many cases go to prison.
As to blacks and other minority groups, the mutual rejection of
parents “has become the new delivery system of disparities by
race,” says Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council. Their high
school graduation rates are far lower; crime, addiction,
incarceration, and mortality rates are higher. Class differences
are perpetuated in the next generation and class solidifies into
caste.
In Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal
Families in a Post-Marital Age, Kay Hymowitz reported that “it
is largely low-income twenty-somethings who are having a baby
without a wedding ring.” The women forgoing husbands “are precisely
the ones who can least afford to do so.” She also said that
“virtually all” children whose families earn more than $75,000 a
year “are living with both parents.”
The culture war presses on with undiminished zeal. The FRC’s
“Index” has not been reported by the major media, who focus
obsessively on “the drop in teen births.” It is not the age but the
marital status of parents that matters-but try telling that to Rob
Stein of the Washington Post.
FOR SOME YEARS, there has also been an organized pretense that
male/female differences are more acculturated than real. With good
training and propaganda it is imagined that such differences can be
eliminated. Hence the push to house college students without regard
to gender — not just on the same dorm but in the same room. The
earlier goal, to thrust women into combat, was similarly
motivated.
The feminist ideologues will certainly fail in their campaign to
homogenize gender. Male and female will remain starkly
differentiated, as always. It’s remarkable, though, that the
attempt has been made, showing the fanaticism of the feminists.
They have gone so far as to play into the hands of promiscuous men
who have long embraced sex without consequences, otherwise known as
the Playboy Philosophy. With a few exceptions, feminists have
reinforced the sexual revolution rather than countered it. They see
inequality of any description as an abomination and as something
that must be stamped out.
Homosexual activists show a comparable fanaticism. They won’t
rest until their goal — moral approval by the pope — has been
achieved. Feeble as the Catholic hierarchy has been since the
Second Vatican Council, especially on sexual matters, such a
surrender in Rome is not in the cards. The repeal of “don’t ask,
don’t tell” may itself have unintended consequences. Some of those
who engage in homosexual activity fear being “outed” by other gays
more than they fear “straight” disapproval. The pretense is that
“openness” is the desideratum where gays are concerned, but the
whole subject remains fraught with taboos. We’ll see what happens.
It may well be that not much will happen, as those urging
DADT repeal have said. The inborn male-female attraction is so
strong that those who do not experience it at all are few —
certainly far less than the touted 10 percent of the population.
Homosexuals may well pose more of a threat to each other than to
society at large.
The agenda of some culture warriors seems to be to apply the
principle of consent to all human action. Exchange by consent —
goods for money, or goods for other goods — is the great
free-market principle, and the unstated social goal of
non-socialists in the West now may be to reduce all relations to
the principle of consent: divorce by consent (omitting the children
of course, because they are likely to be under the age of consent);
military service by consent, suicide by consent, sodomy by consent;
abortion… well, wait a minute, that’s unilateral because the little
critter inside the womb isn’t a human being yet so doesn’t have to
be consulted.
To the godless, all things may seem possible without God, but
Western Civilization will not be possible. We’ll get a different
God, and Mohammed is his prophet.
