Pat Buchanan : Nation is sharply divided on serious issues of morality (from WND.com)
“Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.
Yet, judged by the standards of
those old “pulpits aflame with righteousness,” is America still a good country?
Consider the cases taken up this
week by the Supreme Court.
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| Pat Buchanan (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Whatever their beliefs, the
justices, one trusts, will leave this to the states and people. For Roe v.
Wade, where seven justices found the right to an abortion lurking in the
penumbras of the Ninth Amendment, poisons our politics to this day. We don’t
need a re-enactment of that civil war.
Still, what America decides about
same-sex marriage will reveal much about what this generation believes to be a
moral society.
Traditionalist America has always
held homosexuality to be unnatural and immoral, ruinous to body and soul alike,
and where prevalent – as in Weimar, Germany – the mark of a sick society.
This belief outrages millions. Yet
it is as old as mankind and was held universally in the Christian West until
this century. Moreover, it is grounded in biblical truth, tradition, natural
law and Catholic doctrine.
Before 1973, the American
Psychiatric Association regarded homosexuality as a mental disorder. Most
states treated it as a crime.
The new morality argues thus:
For a significant slice of the
population, homosexuality is natural and normal. They were born this way. And
to deny homosexuals the freedom to engage in consensual sexual relations, or
the right to marry, is bigotry as odious as was discrimination against black
Americans.
Yet, though gospel to many, this
belief has only the most shallow of religious, moral and philosophical roots.
It seems grounded in a post-1960s ideology that holds that all freely chosen
lifestyles are equal, and to discriminate against any is the true social sin.
Needless to say, the traditional
morality and the new morality are irreconcilable.
But if the new morality – that
homosexuality is normal and same-sex marriage morally equal to traditional
marriage – is true and valid, Frank Kameny was a prophet and Christianity is
indictable for 2,000 years of ostracism, persecution and suffering imposed on
homosexuals.
Or perhaps we believe that moral
truth evolves – that, for example, adultery may be immoral for one generation,
but not so for the next.
The issue here goes beyond what the
Court decides.
For even should the advocates of
same-sex marriage prevail, their victory will not be accepted by believers in
the traditional morality, but simply be seen as but another step in America’s
descent down a slippery slope to hell.
Indeed, for millions of Americans,
this society – which has eradicated Christianity from its public institutions
and enshrined secularism in its place, which considers abortion a woman’s
right, which is blasé about 53 million unborn children destroyed since Roe,
which puts homosexual liaisons on the same moral plane as matrimony – is a
society that has lost its moral bearings and is rapidly losing its mind.
Which raises a serious separate
issue.
If we Americans cannot even agree on
what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one
national family? If one half of the nation sees the other as morally depraved,
while the latter sees the former as saturated in bigotry, sexism and
homophobia, how do we remain one united nation and one people?
Today, half of America thinks the
country some of us grew up in was bigoted, racist, homophobic and sexist, while
the other half sees this morally “evolving” nation as a society openly inviting
the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and that is hardly worth preserving.
A common faith and moral code once
held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground,
after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially,
ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us
together?
The Constitution, the Bill of
Rights?
How can they, when we bitterly
disagree on what they say?
By throwing out the old morality and
embracing a new morality on abortion and same-sex marriage, America tossed her
sheet anchor into the sea. And from the turbulent waters we have entered – our
illegitimacy rate is above 40 percent, and no Western nation has a birth rate
that will keep its native-born alive in anything like the present numbers –
America and the West may have set sail on a voyage from which there is no
return.
** The Sheepdog's note - while I have disagreed at times with Pat Buchanan, his article above, written and published last week, provides much for all of us to think about and ponder.
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