REAPING THE RESULTS
OF AMERICA’S SEXUAL REVOLUTION
by James M. Murk
We are presently in the midst of the most critical moral decline in the history of the United States of America. Many in positions of knowledge and power are drawing attention to this fact and showing enormous concern. The symptoms are apparent to every observer. The most drastic are continuously and dramatically presented in the media--violence, crime, drugs, illegitimate births, divorce, wife and child abuse, and fraud. It is not that we have not had a measure of all of these evils in every era, but their unprecedented increase in the past 30 years is alarming to most thinking and caring Americans. It seems like a nightmare that our nation, which prided itself on being such a model democracy and an example to other societies, should now lead all civilized nations in virtually every social pathology.
The increase in the number of dysfunctional families in America has been pointed to as a major cause of this moral debacle. Since the 1960’s we have seen the growth of a new libertine attitude toward sex. It used to be called the “new morality” and was a part of a new emphasis on the virtue of self-expression, which might better be called “selfism”. The American tradition of freedom and civil liberties has been used to defend both the ”new morality” and the resulting fragmentation of families. Freedom of the individual, however, is in direct competition with the rights of families and the rights of society as a whole. Absolute sexual freedom and a healthy family structure are mutually exclusive. They cannot exist for long side-by-side and expect a society to endure. The well-being of children is at stake, and they are the future of any society. This is why the breaking of sexual taboos has been considered immoral and has carried such a heavy punishment in so many human cultures past and present. This “new morality” can be shown to be a root cause of the vast majority of dysfunctional families in America today, which in turn are spawning the most serious social pathologies in our culture.
There are other problem areas which are not mentioned as often but, nevertheless, make a negative impact on our society; namely, pornography, divorce, alcoholism, the use of tobacco, and the many negative role models produced by Hollywood on TV and in the movies. Alcohol and tobacco together are responsible for over 500,000 deaths in our country each year. The cost of just these two legalized drugs to our economy can hardly be calculated but must be reckoned in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Some might callously consider this a trade-off considering the revenue they produce from jobs, trade, and taxes. The incalculable cost in human lives and suffering, however, cannot be whitewashed.
PBS-TV movie critic Michael Medved’s recent book Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) bravely documents the attitude of the liberal popular culture creators who promote the ugliness which is mirrored in the social sicknesses in our society. He deplores the attack on the traditional American family, religion, and moral values of our Jewish-Christian heritage. This conservative Jew is considered a traitor by many in his peer group, but some positive changes in movie and TV offerings in 1993 may be credited to his expose. There were three times as many G and PG-rated movies in 1993 as as there were in 1992, and R-rated movies declined from 61% to 39% of theater offerings. Several family style shows and even an evangelical Christian character (on L.A. Law) appeared that year on television’s prime-time. Some suggested that 1993 was a watershed year. In 1994 there was the appearance of the traditionally oriented Christy on CBS, several professed virgins were written into scripts, and movie and TV fare were a little more family oriented, but there is still a long way to go. The “Ozzie and Harriet” days seem to be gone forever.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, the liberals belittled the issue of “family values.” They berated Dan Quayle’s speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on May 20, 1992. Mr. Quayle made a plea for morality, for the concepts of right and wrong, and affirmed that “bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong.” In one brief sentence he criticized the TV industry for adding to the problem by supporting a role model in Murphy Brown, “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman--mocking the importance of a father by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” No journalist really reviewed this very effective speech, but Hollywood and the media took this one sentence out of context and scorned and ridiculed Quayle unmercifully for his “heartless attack” on a single mother. It has become a classic example of liberal media bias, subaccurate reporting, and willful, calloused blindness to the colossal problem of illegitimacy in American society.
Liberals since the 1970’s had been exalting the new diversity in the structure of the American family as a positive product of the new freedom of expression. Critics who suggested that the breakup of the traditional American family was a serious threat to our society were “dismissed as declinists, pessimists, or nostalgists, unwilling or unable to accept the new facts of life. The dominant view is that the changes in family structure are, on balance, positive.” (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Dan Quayle was Right,”Atlantic Monthly, April 1993, p. 50) In other words, it is being taught that to get away from the exclusivity of the traditional family is right and good. It has been hailed as part of a new American revolution. This idea in recent history has been a Marxist socialist communist value. Communist Russia tried to replace the traditional family 70 years ago and soon discovered that it bred confusion and social weakness.
This philosophical position on the family has been held by at least one very important member of President Clinton’s cabinet who “embodies and lives the term culture radical”; namely, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala. In a speech at the University of Chicago almost three years ago Shalala said that a little girl in the year 2004 would be viewing a whole new world where she would not “know any moms who don’t work, but she knows a lot of moms who are single. She knows some children who only live with their dads, and children who have two dads, or live with their mothers and their grandmothers. In her school books, there are lots of different kinds of friends and family.” (Quoted in John Gizzi, “The Cultural Radicals,” The World and I, Vol. 8, No. 10, October 1993, pp. 26-27)
This concept was stated even more emphatically by Ellen Snortland of the L.A. Times who castigated the Republican administration at the time of the Murphy Brown flap, “Traditional family values is a right-wing euphemism for ‘a white family where daddy’s the boss.’ . . Our country’s government is not pro-motherhood or even pro-parenthood. It’s anti-choice, pro-married and in favor of ‘traditional motherhood’ because the guys in government want the old fairy-tale days back.” These three sentences aptly illustrate the radicalism of the militant ultra-left. By “fairy tale days” Snortland was referring to the way most of society lived in the 1950’s before the culture mutation of the 1960’s. Without any doubt the values of the 1950’s as a whole would be preferred by most conservatives to the moral relativism and confusion of the present day.
In some Outcome Based Education programs in public schools today, it is proposed that “before children can graduate from the first grade, they must demonstrate that they can identify different types of family structures, so that no single type is seen as the only possible one.” (Pete du Pont, quoting the Department of Education, University of Oklahoma in “OBE Plan Proving to be a Failure,” Scripps Howard News Service Release, printed in The Leader Telegram, Eau Claire, WI, April 19, 1994, p. 8A) There was much debate in the 1992 campaign about how to define family. Not wanting to offend voters who were single parents, homosexuals or singles living together, many Republicans compromised their consciences and soft-pedaled their belief that the traditional nuclear family of father and mother with children was the right and best definition of family and should be normative. The Hollywood crowd was enthusiastically riding the wave. Angela Lansbury was asked on a late night talk show “What is your definition of the family?” She answered, “Why, any group of people who feel close to one another.” She was vigorously applauded by all the sheep in the audience. No one wished to admit that there was something awfully wrong about the changes that had taken place in the American family in the past 30 years.
President Clinton, however, in November 1993 addressed a large group of black ministers in Memphis and called for a reexamination of values in our society. He implied that government was no substitute for the family or a supporting community of which the church was a most important part. He expressed deep concern for the existence of child crime and the problem of “children having children.” He also admitted a few days later in an interview on television that he had read Dan Quayle’s famous Murphy Brown speech and found that it really had some very positive things to say. He, however, wanted to avoid being identified with Quayle’s reference to the bad example of Murphy Brown’s support of single parenthood in the TV sitcom by saying that the VP tried to get “cute with Murphy Brown.” He admitted that he believed, however, that children would be much better off in this country if they were born into two parent families. This fact he certainly can understand from his own personal experience.
These positive references by President Clinton to Quayle’s speech have been the only overall commentary of Quayle’s statement ever acknowledged by the liberal media. In an effort to discredit the Vice-President, at the time the speech was made, the media completely ignored all his positive statements and arguments and concentrated only on holding the one incidental statement about Murphy Brown up to scorn. It is a perfect example of the very strong bias, unfairness, and arrogant untrustworthiness of the American liberal press and news media when it comes to presenting conservative issues. Rush Limbaugh called Clinton a “Johnny come lately” in addressing this problem of the decline in family values, which has been obvious to the conservatives in America for years.
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s article “Dan Quayle was Right” (Atlantic Monthly, April 1993, pp. 47-84) was a milestone in bringing the attention of thinking liberals to examine the results of recent extensive sociological studies on the American family.Let me summarize some of the main thrust of her article. She shows how the dissolution of the two parent family--now down to about 27% of the population in America--has had profound, negative, long-term effects on large numbers of children; and that family diversity, which has been extolled by the liberals, “dramatically weakens and undermines society.” This family disruption has been caused (1) by a great increase in the rate of divorce and (2) by the proliferation of single parent families. Both phenomena arose from the self-expression epidemic of the 1960’s. Thirty years later one million children are being adversely affected each year by the dissolving of family bonds. One million more are born illegitimately to unwed mothers. In both cases they add to the millions of children without fathers in America.
Motivated by selfism, the new definition of freedom, adults are abdicating their responsibilities and asking their children to show maturity--patience, understanding and sacrifice--in making the adjustment to either the absence of one parent or to a whole variety of changing relationships--stepparents, new instant brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, boy friends, girl friends and pseudo-relatives. “Clearly what appears to serve adults’ needs for freedom, choice and independence works against children’s needs for security, stability and permanence.” In other words, children are being asked in their formative years to sacrifice for their parents instead of parents sacrificing for their children. It is just the opposite of the principle stated in the New Testament, a value held in America for generations, which can be found in St. Paul’s letter, 2 Corinthians 12:14: “Children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.”
Whitehead points out that in the 1970’s the growing family diversity was greeted with enthusiasm and was actually believed to be better than the old-fashioned, traditional two parent form. It was based on a liberal myth or “wish thought” that children were resilient and adaptable and that they would benefit by the wider network of the new and varied family relationships which resulted from divorce. It was even hailed as a “new birth” of equality and freedom, a belief that a tolerance of this diversity was a wonderful sign of social progress. It was greeted with approval by those whose selfishness was being pampered as the “new American revolution.” Most of its results, however, have proved to be negative for families as a whole and especially devastating for children.
One negative area has been the increase in poverty. Single parent families and the divorced usually receive less economic support. They often slip into poverty and become dependent on welfare. Even when there are no economic problems, furthermore, children perform poorly in school, which is due to an emotional incapacity not to an intellectual deficit. “The biggest problem schools face is the rising number of children who come from disrupted families.” These children have more difficulty establishing the relationships, which are supposed to lead to love and a stable marriage. They find it difficult to hold a steady job. They show disruptive, retaliatory behavior, in extreme cases turning to crime and premature sexual experiences.
Over 70% of all young people in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes. Almost all children from dysfunctional families have problems with their fathers. This lack of male bonding can lead to future homosexual relationships. Even the mother/daughter bond is weakened. Less natural concern and sense of responsibility is shown for aging parents. Families with a stepparent are often worse, even suffering the severe risk of sexual abuse because the incest taboo is more fragile. “Disrupted families threaten the psychological well-being of children.” Teen suicide rates, for example, have tripled. All the above problems become imprinted on the child’s psyche and persist into adulthood.
Prior to the 1960’s, forms of family disruption, such as separation, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births, were held in check by powerful religious, social and legal sanctions. They were generally considered abnormal, deviant behavior. Only 11% of children in the 1950’s experienced their parents divorcing before they were 18 years of age. Today this figure is over 50% with many experiencing it more than once. One elementary teacher in a Wisconsin public school shared with me that 20 years ago, only about 15% of his students came from dysfunctional families, today 65% of them do. This has caused untold disciplinary and learning problems in the classroom. The number of illegitimate births has skyrocketed even with the safety valve of legalized abortion. Growing up in America today is a turbulent experience. This is the first generation in the history of our nation which is worse off psychologically, socially, economically and educationally than its parents.
Quoting sociological studies, Whitehead outlines three major areas of significant breakdown in society caused by family disintegration. They are (1) poverty, (2) crime, and (3) educational decline. The breakup of the two parent family is by far the most important cause of adversity in these three areas of social pathology in America. A growing number of Americans have devalued sexual fidelity, lifelong relationships, and parenthood to such an extent that a record number, about 25%, are living alone or cohabiting with a mate “without portfolio.”
This crisis in the American family, especially the increase in single parent families, has finally become “front page stuff.” In an article in October 1993 in the Wall Street Journal called “The Coming White Underclass” (Reprinted in the Reader’s Digest, March 1994, pp. 50-53.) sociologist Charles Murray linked the development of a large criminal underclass in our major cities to the great increase in illegitimate births. Births out-of-wedlock in the African-American society have jumped from 26% in 1965 to 68% in 1993 and to even 80% in the urban ghettos. Among whites, including Hispanics, the percentage in 1993 was 22% compared to as low as 3-5% in 1960.
Murray’s solution has earned him the appellation “king of mean.” He believes that we must abolish all welfare to unmarried women. He urged the government to stop rewarding, thereby promoting, illegitimacy by subsidizing it financially. It is obvious that the more children a single mother has, the larger will be her welfare check each month. There is little shame anymore in being an unwed mother, and it may be purposely sought as an asset enabling a teenager to become independent with her own money and apartment. The welfare system appears to reward promiscuity. In a generation to come we may have four to five times as many of these under-privileged offspring as we do today with a corresponding gross increase in crime and social problems. It is the “snowball effect.” This will put us right in the running with many third world Latin American countries where 80% of the children are born out of legal wedlock. Our whole society, instead of just our ghettos, may be living behind high walls, protected by bars on all our doors and windows.
In trying to find the cause of America’s moral and social breakdown, politicians have treated the symptoms (1) By attacking crime directly: “Get rid of guns! Increase the number of police and prison cells! Make punishments tougher!” (2) By urging the integration of schools and neighborhoods so that the underprivileged can profit by the more privileged environment and thus equalize education. This assumes incorrectly that a liberal education is the answer to our moral crisis rather than a possible cause. (3) By trying to raise the economic and educational levels of the underclass. None of these efforts have worked even if we throw billions of dollars at the problem. (This creates doubt that Mr. Annenberg’s widely publicized largess to public schools to improve education will do anything to alleviate the problems of violence in our schools, which he deplores, and which he said prompted his gift of 500 million dollars.) And finally (4) By viewing violence and other evils as public health problems rather than as a breakdown in moral character. Being a moral person is, first of all, being able to distinguish right from wrong, and then being willing to choose the right, or the constructive, behavior. In schools and in the popular culture we have been teaching moral relativism--or ”make up your own rules”--instead of what is basically right and wrong; i.e., what is constructive and destructive to the individual, the family and the society. We have maximized self-expression and promoted a false doctrine of civil liberties thus minimizing the development of conscience and character based on universal ethical principles.
The major weakness in all of the above solutions is that none of them treat the principal cause of the problem--the dysfunctional family. This failing institution multiplies itself and continues to breed more and more pathological offspring who are responsible for much of the destructive and substandard behavior in American society. The victims of divorce and illegitimacy are the children, many of whom grow up angry, hating themselves. Not having developed a moral conscience, they take vengeance on themselves and on society.
But what is the root cause of the increasing numbers of divorces and single parent families which are responsible for all this dysfunction? These changes in family structure have paralleled the cultural mutation of the 1960’s. This was practically an extreme philosophy of freedom which exalted individual rights. It was an overconcen-tration on self-expression: self-centeredness, selfism, or selfishness--a”do as I please” attitude, which says “man belongs to himself, not to anyone else, not to family and not to society.” This new approach to freedom and liberty has infected the liberal elite definition of civil rights, which leads to anarchy. It is not the same as the liberty exalted by our Founding Fathers, but is a libertinism akin to the philosophy that launched the French Revolution of 1789 which failed so miserably. This foreign quest for individual liberty wound up with the dictatorship of Napoleon (1796-1815) in order to restore stability and order to a French society run amok.
This libertine philosophy of freedom and self expression fostered a new sexual revolution in the 1960’s called the “new morality,” which was simply a justification of the old sexual immorality or promiscuity. This “swinging” culture, which encourages multiple partners before marriage, creates the habit of “fooling around.” It predisposes one to be programed for unfaithfulness. Adultery becomes the major cause of conflict between husbands and wives and the number one cause of divorce. Living together first has not proved to be a solution. All studies have shown that those who live together first get divorced first. It is the children who suffer. Karen Peterson in a study of female sexuality reported in USA Today as “Which Women are More Likely to Stray--and Why?” says, “Researchers routinely now link extensive premarital sex and post wedding infidelity.” (USA Today, March 10, 1994, p. 4D)
This is the “dirty little secret” of our generation which no one wants to talk or write about and no politician wants to touch. The vaunted “new morality” of the 1960’s, which used to be considered deviant, and had been relegated to the “back alley” culture by earlier generations of Americans, has emerged to flaunt itself on Main Street USA. We have “defined deviancy down!” What is now called soft porn--magazines like Playboy and R-rated films--today flows in the main stream. The emphasis now is placed on self-expression and pleasuring oneself rather than on the disciplines of self-sacrifice or self-control. Adults are indulging themselves at the expense of the next generation and of many generations to come. We have birthed our own American brand of hedonism, and it emerges in to affect almost all aspects of our lives, especially our spending habits.
Because of the popularity of the very flawed Kinsey Institute studies in human sexual behavior, furthermore, sex has been removed from the moral/immoral category. It is now considered amoral, simply a necessary function of the physical nature of the human being. Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s popular philosophy that sex is natural and fun and therefore should be engaged in freely by any and all varieties of consensual relationships has only been tempered by the AIDS epidemic. In fact, the new amoral sex, taught as just a normal part of being human with few restrictions, has been encouraged among teenagers and even younger children by magazines, movies, television, especially MTV, music lyrics and rock groups, and even in some sex educational manuals, such as Dr. Pomeroy’s Boys and Sex and Girls and Sex. The sex education programs of Planned Parenthood and Siecus assume that young people will be sexually active, approve it in principle and philosophy, and resist efforts to teach abstinence. Because this new point of view on sex seems to be so widely accepted and practiced, many educators have unfortunately given up on the idea of teaching abstinence even in the face of the danger of the HIV virus. Instead they have been pushing the teaching of the use of condoms, which is extremely controversial in that it appears to condone and encourage promiscuity. This is extremely dangerous not only because of AIDS, but also because already 43 million Americans have suffered from at least one of 26 STD’s. AIDS coordinator Kristine Gebbie, however, citing the dangers of a repressive Victorian society, called the teaching of abstinence criminal, and said to group in Dallas that an abstinence-based curriculum was irresponsible, spreading fear among youth about sex leading to their becoming adults who would see nothing positive about their sexuality. (Quoted in Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine, February 21, 1994, p 6.) She has since resigned from the Clinton administration. Groups like Planned Parenthood and outspoken leaders like former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders dogmatically promote “safe-sex” with condoms and sex education as early as kindergarten. This practice in itself is an acceptance and an encouragement of the “new morality” down to the level of children, who are too young to emotionally grasp what their mentors are trying to teach them.
In the majority of so-called primitive societies sex was regulated for the protection of the well-being of the society. Usually the smaller the group the more stringent were the rules, because to allow promiscuous behavior and/or adultery was inimical to the health and reproduction of the group. The nuclear family--father and mother with children--has always been the basis of all healthy human societies. Even polygynous societies are considered by anthropologists to be based on the nuclear family. Where fathers take responsibility for their children, each unit of wife and children is considered a family with a husband in common. Sexual aberration which threatened the whole society was often punishable by death. Some primitive societies, such as some American Indian tribes, permitted a measure of premarital sex but absolutely forbade adultery on pain of severe punishment or death.
Capital punishment for adultery was practiced by ancient Israel. The “rules of God” given by Moses and the prophets prohibited adultery, incest or perverted sex on the pain of execution usually by stoning. (viz., Leviticus Chapter 18 and 20:10-24) Premarital sex was not allowed to become promiscuous because it was always followed by a “shot-gun” wedding. Or a heavy fine was prescribed if it was the man’s fault and even death in some cases if it was the woman’s.
Why has sexual sin been so often considered such an awful crime, a capital offense? Human groups have learned by experience that they cannot function as a viable society very long without channeling or controlling the sexual drive. It must be disciplined in order to assure the stability of the family and secure the proper rearing of the next generation. The nuclear family must be protected, and individual freedom must be controlled in the area of sexual expression for the health and well-being, and even the survival, of the society as a whole.
Absolute sexual freedom and a healthy family structure are mutually exclusive. They cannot exist for long side-by-side and expect the society to endure. This is why thebreaking of sexual taboos has been considered immoral (meaning individually or socially destructive) and has carried such a heavy punishment in so many human cultures. It is the root cause of the most serious social pathologies in our own American society today.
Perhaps the principal reason the Bible is avoided, even derided, today; and the Ten Commandments are no longer portrayed in schools is because of the strict teachings of the Bible in the area of sex. The writings of Moses, the prophets, of Jesus and the apostles proscribe all sexual aberrations because they are destructive--premarital sex, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality. They are not victimless crimes because ultimately the whole culture is victimized. What is called fornication (the Greek word porneia meaning ‘to indulge unlawful lust’ from which we derive our word pornography) can include all sexual perversions. Both Jesus and the Apostle Paul place sexual immorality at the top of their lists of active sins. In Mark 7:20-23 Jesus taught his disciples,“What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”
The Apostle Paul records a little different list in his letter to the Galatians (5:19-21) “The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Note also Paul’s letter to the Colossians (3:5-6):“Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.”
The Bible teaches that there is a specific link between societal sexual addiction and man’s rebellion against God’s rules. In his letter to the Romans, chapter one, the Apostle Paul links rebellion against God to a curse of sexual impurity, which is the first sign of God’s displeasure in allowing the breakdown of human society. It is pictured as God removing a “hedge of protection” from around the society which ceases to acknowledge Him. In other words, God turns us over to expressions of sexual excess and impurities when we discard Him. It is a primary sin, part of a “do as I please” philosophy, and the specific sign, as well as object, of God’s anger.
One theological conclusion or interpretation of this whole scenario might go like this: When America in the official capacity of our Supreme Court in 1962-63 first removed prayer and the Bible from the schools where they had been in use for over 200 years, it was like telling God that He was no longer welcome as a part of the teaching of our children. God therefore turned our nation over to defile itself in an orgy of sexual impurity. This widespread exercise in “loose living” has now, with all its negative ramifications for the family, become the number one root cause of all our societal ills.
The Bible was taught in our schools for generations. Even when it was not taught directly, the morality of the Bible was upheld, or at least assumed as normative, in the public schools until the early 1960’s. W.A. Early, a past president of the National Education Association had said as late as 1953 that the public schools were committed to teaching the American heritage which included moral and spiritual values whose source in our culture was found in the Bible and in the teachings of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. As strange as this seems today, this should not be regarded as unusual. This had been the position of our Founding Fathers and the majority of educators in America from the earliest beginnings of our nation. Noah Webster, called America’s Schoolmaster, made this prophetic statement, for example, “It is extremely important to our nation, in a political as well as religious view, that all possible authority and influence should be given to the Scriptures, for these furnish the best principles of civil liberty, and the most effectual support of republican government. The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.”
Today the Bible tends to be ignored in the halls of public education, and Biblical morality is even derided and scorned. To call concerned Christians Bible bigots is to condemn at once all our Founding Fathers and all the traditions that made us a strong and respected nation. In actuality, it is a virtual rejection of all our institutions. We are paying the penalty which Noah Webster predicted. Our Founding Fathers knew that there could be no moral dialogue without religion. They said as much many times. In the midst of this moral breakdown only religious traditions have the muscle and the energy to bring back a consensus on ethical guide-lines which are meaningful in opposing the perversions of the ideal of freedom and civil liberties proposed by anarchists who practice a very selfish and destructive “do as I please” philosophy. This perverted doctrine of freedom is a contemporary liberal delusion--a kind of liberal insanity! A Freudian rationalization for the fulfillment of wants and desires. If we were to blame any one immediate power group besides our humanistic and secularistic educational institutions, it would be some of the misguided and shortsighted liberal jurists of the United States Supreme Court in the last 30 years. It is the fault of those who have radically reinterpreted the Constitution based on their own social opinions and philosophies. They have followed after the opinion enunciated by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes who claimed, “The Constitution is what the judges say it is.” They are principally at fault for contradicting our original American heritage and for ignoring the consequential breakdown in the morality of our country.
All the sickness in our society arises from the conscious rejection of our Jewish-Christian heritage and its moral standards, especially the rules for sexual behavior. Our Founding Fathers, if alive, would cry “Treason!” and they would condemn the Supreme Court for subversive decisions and the illegal rewriting and complete mismanagement of the Constitution which the Founders had bequeathed to the republic of the United States of America. The poisonous fall-out from the decisions of 1962-63 with regard to prayer, the Bible, and subsequent decisions concerning the Ten Commandments in the schools has seriously crippled our culture and compromised the future viability of any moral leadership and credibility we might have had in the world. The world recognizes that America is in a precipitous moral and social decline. We lead all civilized nations in every social pathology. The ultimate economic and political consequences of our degeneration may jeopardize any Super Power status we have achieved. Our 200-year-old experiment will have succumbed to the disease of moral turpitude and incompetence.
Epilogue
The Founding Fathers warned us that the government they had birthed was very fragile, depending for its viability on a morally disciplined citizenry. Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Recently 100,000 policemen were added to America’s municipal forces in order to control crime, an ultimate expression of human selfishness.
John Adams said that the new republic was unable to contend with human passions that were not under the control of moral or religious convictions:
“Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. . . This form of government is productive of everything which is great and excellent among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted. . . A government is only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals. Private and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. . . The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.”
James Madison, who was called The Father of the Constitution, agreed in similar statements:
“Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe. Religion is the basis and foundation of government. . . We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Thomas Jefferson was not one of the framers of the Constitution but he wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He was not a Deist, as some have claimed, but a Theist and was committed to a belief in the providence of God. He expressed his beliefs in his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781,
“Religion is deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support. . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; and that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
The above observations are so prophetic of our condition today when our society is falling apart for lack of moral guidance. If Jefferson and the others were alive today, I am sure that they would be aghast at our permissiveness and our refusal to teach our children the basic fundamentals of the Jewish-Christian value system upon which all the Founding Fathers, in agreement together, had established this nation, its culture, its basic philosophy, and all of its institutions.