"Culture of Death Defined by Lack of Boundaries"

A tale of one man's cultural epiphany.

An insightful column by Kyle Eller (a fan of Mark Shea), yesterday, in something called the Budgeteer News:

The American Psychiatric Association decided recently it wasn’t going to normalize pedophilia, a move that had been discussed at one of its symposiums.

Go ahead, re-read that sentence a couple of times. Let it sink in. It didn’t get much mainstream press....

But the Culture War is less a fight between people who draw different lines of morality than one between people who draw lines and people who don’t. It’s less between saints and sinners than between people who believe in such a thing as sin and people who don’t.

As we approach America’s birthday, I think it’s worth remembering that Alexis de Tocqueville, a believer in the separation of church and state and certainly no theocrat, upon observing America, said religion was the de facto first American political institution, underpinning the secular civil freedoms of our government. That mirrors the understanding of many of America’s founders. Successful free governance presupposes a free people of good character.

In a postmodern culture that, rather nonsensically, declares the nonexistence of absolute truth as an absolute truth, where do this character and the common values needed for a functioning society come from? If honest talk about values in the public square is a hate crime, how can values continue to exist?

Boundaries are needed. All people have an equal right to express views, but not all views are equally right. At what point, if any, will America unite around those simple facts?

(Thanks, Mark.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 06/28/03 09:31:18 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.