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Invisible, but Enduring

Invisible, but Enduring

Last updated on: March 27, 2013 at 9:37 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Invisible, but Enduring 2013-03-27T09:37:08-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Recently, Reed Galen, deputy campaign manager for the McCain camp gave some political advice. While this might be compared to asking coaches of the Minnesota Vikings how to win a Super Bowl, this particular advice has become conventional wisdom amongst most people with graduate education in the Republican Party.

He opines:

Regardless of party affiliation, young voters view gay marriage as utterly uncontroversial. With all of the other problems the country has to solve, the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they see fit seems a foregone conclusion.

Opinions are unlikely to change over the course of two days this week. The high court will take its time to decide the merits of the cases. Whatever the justices decide, we should look in our collective national mirror and ask ourselves : Are we a country, and a party, of more freedom or less.

We are told that people strongly homosexual are roughly six percent of the population. It is interesting to observe that the young adults who view homosexuality as a sin and support traditional marriage are at least three times their number. Evidently, however, these young adults are to be forced into a political closet and told to pretend to agree or Mr. Galen merely pretends they don’t exist.

Such young adults should start wearing shirts that proclaim they are “one in five,” that they too are children and grandchildren made as invisible in the media as the millions who still pray before their meals.

In fact, even those young Americans who, with great moral difficulty, are able to concede civil marriage rights, though they wish they did not have to do so, do not exist. All the Americans who favor “gay marriage” view the right to vice as utterly uncontroversial!

This is false, but it is the sort of falsehood that a segment of the educated class use to comfort themselves. If they only act now, opposition to their view will vanish just as abortion became merely a medical procedure once old people in the 1970’s died out.

If one points out the opposite happened, then after a painful silence, one is told that these remnants of young people are confused by other old people and corrupted by outside influences. In the world of American higher education, there are always old traditionalists confusing a segment of the young, just as in the Soviet Union for seventy years the rulers comforted themselves that only “grandmothers” went to Church.

After seventy years these were very, very old grandmothers, but still the future was with communism. And once it was. There was a day when all the youth saw the future in what were then new ideas and knew this social experiment would work.

People who questioned this were mocked as being behind the curve of history.

Of course, gay marriage is not nearly so sweeping a social program and is not likely to be as harmful and certainly not harmful in the same way. Unless our assent is demanded by the state, then gay marriage is a move to social decadence not to tyranny. More serious in that regard are easy divorce, adultery, and fornication. Pop culture now often assumes that first comes attraction, then sex (safe of course!), then love, then moving in together, then (maybe) marriage. We face America-become-Vegas more than America-become-North Korea and for that we can be thankful.

If you are a poor person, then good luck to that. The best thing about gay marriage is that at least someone is wanting to get married.

I would rather live in Vanity Faire than Mordor.

Nor should we panic about the future. We are declaring a vice a right, a sin a virtue, but then Americans have often done this. Slavery was after all a “property right” and we survived this morally depraved judgment.

This intellectual fad, despite all dangers, will fade just as other fads labeled “science” or “progress” have done many times in the history of the Christian church. I am not likely to see it, but it will happen.

Still we live in very ethically incoherent times. Where will most people get their morality? On basis should Americans decide what “should be?” The traditional Christian consensus is vanishing for the moment, but it is being replaced by hedonism.

Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, are adverse to any check, public or private, on their pleasure. As long as “it doesn’t hurt anyone” with harm made very individual, measured over the short term, and mostly physical. The degradation of the soul doesn’t show up on a CAT scan and so we can ignore it.

One can see this “consistency” of ethical hedonism in polls. Any question to check or moderate desire is unpopular. When the left attacks gluttony or the right promiscuity, both are mocked. That we are too gluttonous or too promiscuous is not considered . . . or mostly (almost entirely) in terms of the health of the human animal.

Eventually such simple hedonism, still undergirded by remnants of the jolly parts of Christianity, must perish by its sheer incoherence and its destructive havoc on the poor.

Then from the Pope to the Southern Baptists today’s righteous remnant of young people, grown battle tested by time will introduce again the Christian alternative.

Our distant future, if we are to remain free, will look more like our Christian past.

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