When looking back on ex-heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s disease, boxing fans will generally talk about how compromised he was in his last several bouts. In reality, the condition likely manifested itself long before in relatively mild symptoms some mistook for normal aging. And so it is with cultural disease: Observers will only define its history based on the symptoms obvious to them.
In the Saturday edition of the New York Post, Kyle Smith writes that a “massive, silent cultural revolution has changed America” in a short span of time from a land somewhat opposed to the homosexual agenda to one accepting of many of its major demands. He writes:
Support for gay marriages to be treated the same as straight ones went from 39 percent just nine years ago to 60 percent today, according to Gallup. As recently as 2010, a clear majority opposed gay marriage. Today, a large majority support it.
As for the broader issue of whether gay and lesbian relationships are even morally acceptable, only 40 percent said yes in 2001. Today that number stands at 63 percent.
In other words, more Americans are OK with homosexuality than were OK with divorce (59 percent) in 2001.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Moreover, Smith tells us that while most Americans a decade ago considered homosexuality a function of nurture, now 51 percent believe it’s inborn, versus 30 percent in disagreement.
Most (in)famously and perhaps not coincidentally, Barack Obama changed his position on marriage during this period as well, announcing in May 2012 that he was now in support of faux marriage (that is, again — being for it before he was against it, he also advocated it in 1996).
Smith states that it’s hard to say what caused these changes, but it isn’t, really. He correctly points out that older Americans are dying off and that popular culture has mainstreamed homosexual characters. As to the latter, activist and psychologist Marshall Kirk and his co-author, Hunter Madsen, Ph.D. (described as an expert on public persuasion tactics), wrote in their 1990 book After the Ball that Americans would be desensitized to homosexuality through a “continuous flood of gay-related advertising,” a “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” Of course, added to these factors is America’s decline in Christian faith and the correlative rise in moral relativism. Yet we can’t begin to truly grasp what happened until we understand when it happened.
Smith goes back to 2001, but this time frame is essentially quite arbitrary. Sure, only 40 percent of Americans accepted homosexual relationships at that time, but in 1987, the figure not surprisingly was even lower, with 75 percent of the public saying “same-sex relations are ‘always wrong.’” Support for faux marriage stood at 39 percent nine years ago, but it was only 11 percent in 1988. And the traditionalism was even more pronounced in far earlier times. In fact, as the NORC research organization at the University of Chicago wrote, “The change toward acceptance of homosexuality began in the late 1980s” — it was not a third-millennium phenomenon as Smith seems to believe. What Smith is noticing, rather, is not a time frame encompassing a revolution, but a tipping point. This is why Obama changed his position on faux marriage: Once public support for it passed the 50 percent mark, he knew it was politically safe to wear his banner openly.
Yet it isn’t even true that this “revolution” started in the late ’80s. And while Smith also wrote that it “happened without a Summer of Love, without Timothy Leary, without a groovy anthem or a shaggy new national look,” this overlooks that these things had already happened. But this isn’t to say, either, that it began with the Sexual Revolution of the ’60s.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality.… The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.” Chesterton could pen these prescient words not just because he was a prognosticator without peer, but perhaps because they were written in (1926) the midst of the Roaring ’20s, with its feminism, flappers, and increasing decadence.
Going back far further in time, the second book of Maccabees tells a story of a Jewish woman and her seven sons, who chose death over submitting to a king’s demand they violate their faith and eat pork. Whether or not we think it wise to martyr oneself over dietary restrictions, the story teaches a lesson: If you allow the periphery of your traditions to be destroyed, what’s beneath it will then also be subject to attack. What lies below that will be next, so on and so forth, until the very kernel of your beliefs is imperiled. This is especially true when all your beliefs are supported by the same rationale (in the Jews’ case, that their beliefs are divine enjoinments).
There was a time when Westerners, as part of Christendom, believed that marriage was a divinely ordained union of a man and woman and that “what God hath joined, let no man put asunder.” This provided no wiggle room. But then people wanted divorce — then easy divorce — and justice-of-the-peace weddings. And soon, à la Elizabeth Taylor, some were changing spouses like shoes, treating marriage as loose friendships: They’re joined, and only continue, as long as they feel right. Most significantly, these phenomena reflected the growing belief that marriage is just a man-made institution. And what man has made can by him be remade (or unmade).
Faux marriage is merely a continuation of this.
So it is also with sexual behavior, as we didn’t go from the virtue of chastity to Chastity Bono overnight. When we believed in God’s plan for man’s sexuality — confining it to a married man and woman — there was no wiggle room. But then hedonism’s head was reared, and people wanted burlesque, fornication, and cohabitation without judgment. And what lay somewhat further down the road? Upon eating the pork, the process had begun.
As to this process, sex increasingly was seen not as a moral issue, but a recreational one (hence the term “recreational sex”); as a former client once said to me while defending homosexual behavior, “But if that’s what you enjoy…” His logic was sound: If sex is mere fun, then who are we to tell others how to have their fun? It would be like claiming that golf and basketball are fine but soccer is a no-no; or saying that, well, we can abide vanilla or strawberry but chocolate is out of bounds. It’s the difference between matters of Truth and of taste.
Speaking of which, ultimately everything is a matter of taste when one doesn’t believe in Truth. Relating to this, a Barna Group study conducted, incidentally, in Smith’s chosen year of 2001, showed that 64 percent of adults believe “moral truth is [always] relative to the circumstances” (of course, it isn’t then actually “moral truth”). And only six percent of teenagers believed so at the time. This is relevant because while “who’s to say it’s ‘wrong’?”relativism justifies fornication, cohabitation, and any other behavior; homosexuality is part of the “any other” category. It’s a package deal.
Also note that Barna’s 2001 teenagers are now adults, answering polls, voting, and influencing policy on all sorts of things — including marriage. And their moral compasses weren’t formed in 2001.
As for cultural disease, there is something worse than not recognizing early symptoms or any at all: mistaking the malignancy for health.
