Already great social changes have occurred in the United States as detailed brilliantly by Charles Murray in his recent book, Coming Apart wherein he analyses the behavioral, economic, and demographic changes in white America since 1963, just before President Kennedy was assassinated. The results are sobering and, in some cases, horrific, especially within what he calls the New Lower Class. In all the categories of what he defines as the founding virtues, industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity things have drastically deteriorated. Deteriorated to such a degree that Murray posits we may have already passed a tipping point, and certainly if present trends continue, we will pass a tipping point at which the American project will end. Not that we will no longer be a rich and powerful nation, but that the founding virtues that made America unique in the countries of the world and singular in human history will have deteriorated in the popular American culture such that that uniqueness will disappear and the American experiment will have been deemed a failure.
Looking at the founding virtues listed by Murray--industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity--it should be obvious that they all proceeded from biblical moral truth, and therefore much of their deterioration is due America's increasing abandonment of biblical morality and its acceptance of the new morality of feeling. But since I started this commentary in my prior post as a response to the question of same sex-marriage, and the normalization of homosexual behavior in general, let me focus on that particular.
Whenever the question of same-sex marriage comes up advocates inevitably ask opponents this question: "but how will it hurt your marriage?" And of course the answer is that it will not hurt my marriage, nor any other marriage already in existence that is already based on biblical principles. But if enacted it threatens the continued existence of marriage, and threatens to alter the way we look at many other essential elements of our culture and society--and here is how. First a brief history lesson.
As the first form of ethical monotheism in recorded human history Judaism was unique in its claims that God was distinct from nature. In the pantheistic religions the gods were immanent, a part of nature, and ethics was not part of religion, only sacrifice and worship. Yahweh, however, was transcendent to nature. He pre-existed nature, and nature was merely his creation. He demanded ethical behavior based on His own good and perfect character, which He called "holiness" (literally meaning separate, distinct, set apart). Almost all of the ritual law of the Torah (circumcision, dress, diet, food preparation, etc.) all exist to reinforce this concept of separation and distinction. There are other distinctions identified in scripture that predate even the law, first enumerated in the creation story: the heavens from the earth, the waters from the dry land, the plants from the animals, the human from the animal. But one of the most important distinctions is between male and female. The male/female distinction actually serves in many places throughout scripture, both Jewish and Christian, as a simile for the difference between and God and man: God as the husband and an unfaithful nation of Israel as an adulterous wife in several prophetic writings; Christ as a husband and the Church as his bride in numerous places in the New Testament.
But more than just metaphorical use is made of the male/female distinction. Different sets of behaviors and expectations are codified between the male and female all through scripture. Very clear roles and boundaries are delineated, all based on this distinction. And the Jewish and Christian cultures are by no means unique in this. Every culture in human history has recognized the male/female distinction and developed a plethora of differing forms of dress, divisions of labor, legal obligations, ritual and other social constructs based on this biological difference. Even in our present age of feminism, we still recognize this distinction in law and culture: we still bar our female military personnel from serving as combatants; we still have separate bathrooms for men and women and make it illegal for members of the opposite sex to use the bathrooms designated for the other.
The central identifying characteristic of marriage in every period of history and every culture on the face of the earth is that it's a bond between a man and a woman, a ritualized social connection with a host of attendant responsibilities and privileges encompassing the biological imperative of the unique function that only that bond can produce: creating children. If we recognize this truth at the heart of marriage, we can see that the concept has a teleology: in other words, when we use the word "marriage" we are not just using a word that we can define this or any other way, we are rather describing something that already exists in nature. In other words, the word "marriage" is descriptive not prescriptive, and therefore if we redefine the word, we are only changing the meaning of the word, and not the thing we first used the word to describe: you can call your grandma "Chevy", but that doesn't make her a car.
But of course this is what the present move in our culture--supported by the "new morality"--is trying to do. And the way this is being done--and the reason it has far greater destructive implications than just to marriage--is to eradicate this fundamental building block of civilization: distinctions. The core assertion of the same-sex marriage project is that there is no difference between men and women-- other than biological--and that the biological difference is so insignificant that it should be ignored. This is taken to such an extreme under this system of thought that proponents maintain that sexual identity itself should not be determined by biology but rather by--and if you're still skeptical of my initial premise of the "new morality", this should settle the argument--the feelings of the individual. As I've written before, this is why the misuse of the word gender has come into common usage: to disconnect sexual identity from biology. (To recap: gender is not an attribute of human beings, but rather of words: i.e., words--especially in the Latin-derived languages--are attributed with masculine or feminine gender, were as human beings are of the male or female sex.)
Consider the ways in which advocates of the "new morality" are trying to eradicate distinctions:
1. PETA, and many others are teaching that there is no hierarchy between human or any form of animal life.
2. There is ever increasing reluctance for adults to require children to address them with traditional honorifics of respect (Mr. Smith or Miss Jones) but rather by their first names, indicating an inexorable weakening of the distinction between child and adult.
3. It is rare to see any sort of even self-imposed dress code in an ever-expanding range of social situations--church, high school graduations, up-scale restaurants, even wedding receptions--indicating weakening distinctions between those social contexts and any other day or situation.
4. The pervasive use of even egregious profanity in public, men to women, and adults to children, indicate the fading of the distinctions of appropriate social context, private and public, sacred and profane.
5. Universities and colleges all over the United States are experimenting with bathrooms that have no sexual identifier--in other words, one bathroom for everybody.
6. The feminist movement has fought for decades in this country to remove all distinctions between the sexes in Federal and State law. They have also fought vigorously to overturn the US military proscription against female personnel serving in combat.
7. The fight for same-sex marriage, based as it is on the premise that there is no meaningful distinction between men and women, by implication also assert that there is no meaningful distinction between fatherhood and motherhood. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that either one of them (as long as the other is in place) can be viewed as completely unnecessary.
Dennis Prager has said that same-sex marriage is the most radical social experiment in which we have ever engaged. We simply have no idea what the implications could be on civilization of removing all these fundamental distinctions. But the possibilities are terrifying and seem bound to further disintegrate the connecting tissue of our social order, especially considering how the "new morality" has already deteriorated the American character. I don't know how effective the American Church can be in retarding this process, or in influencing the greater culture back to biblical morality, but one thing seems certain: we will have no effect and no influence if we too abandon biblical morality and, out of a sense of inclusivity, capitulate to the "new morality".
P.S. Let me give attribution to Dennis Prager for the argument of distinctions and Greg Koukl for the teleology of marriage.
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