Any nation, in order to survive as a just and free society, must stand on two legs. One of these legs is law. The US is blessed to have a written Constitution that protects the individual, maximizes individual freedom, and limits governmental authority to its essential functions.
The other leg is the culture. The culture cannot be written down, and no bureaucracy can administer it. Yet it is every bit as vital as the Constitution, and indeed, it is our cultural degradation that has undermined our Constitution to the point where it is flagrantly violated, even by the government itself. It is here that Libertarianism fails. For Libertarianism is culture neutral. While its beginning point is in a strong society that values freedom, it is also rooted in a society with strong traditions of family values, faith in the Creator, and moral standards of conduct in which individuals are answerable even for certain private behaviors. Libertarianism jettisons those cultural values in which it arose, and pretends that the potted plant of liberty can be nourished without the soil of faith and family. This puts the cultural conservative in a difficult position when debating with Libertarians. For one cannot by definition logically prove God (God is not small enough to fit into any debate). And describing why same-sex marriage will erode the culture is an argument that easily gets sidetracked into fake straw, such as, those two guys living together cannot threaten your marriage. Here is how I frame my socially conservative position. My disadvantage is that this is not a simple one-liner argument. But here it is. In the 1950s, USA, there was somewhat of a social crisis of out-of- wedlock pregnancy. As many as several hundred teenage high schoolers per year were getting pregnant. Of course this is a minuscule number compared to today. Why was the rate so low? For several reasons. One, there were severe unofficial, cultural penalties for an out of wedlock pregnancy. The family was shamed. The girl was shamed. Pregnant girls were immediately removed from school, as a signal to other teenage girls in her class. Because of the penalties, girls on a date were very afraid of doing anything that might get them pregnant. Indeed, even a girl who was discovered not to be a virgin lost her reputation and was stigmatized. And so the unmarried pregnancy rate was very low. It was all so unfair. But then along came a solution: The Birth Control Pill. At last, the era had arrived when girls no longer needed to fear getting pregnant. A pill would prevent that from happening. Girls could now be just as sexually liberated as their boyfriends were. Fairness and equality were now established, and the plague of unwanted pregnancies would plummet to near zero. At least that was the theory. We know now that that is not what happened. Once “the pill” was in use, the rate of unwanted pregnancies did not go down. It went up. It skyrocketed. Among some demographic groups, 65 percent of all babies are born to never-been-married girls and women. Add to that the millions of abortions, and it is clear that if anything, the pill had the opposite effect of its hope and promise. But why? Because the pill helped change the culture. Once the threat of pregnancy was removed, then so was the stigma of not being a virgin. When we removed the expectation that unmarried girls should be virgins, then we also removed the stigma of being pregnant out of wedlock. That in turn made it “okay” to have a baby without a husband. Eventually, the mantra became, “if it feels good, then do it.” That in turn, even if indirectly, made “okay” all of the following: out of wedlock sex, drugs, fatherless households, and homosexuality. But at least the system had become “fair,” had it not? But what was fair about condemning millions of children to fatherlessness and the poverty it created? What was fair about the thousands of deaths from AIDS? What was fair about slaughtering millions of unborn babies? Libertarians believe in bearing the cost of one’s actions, and not passing those costs on to another. But the only effective way of ensuring social cohesion, and national survival, is to maintain a culture founded in the traditions of family, morals and yes, even religion. Anything else is not only disastrous, it is also, here’s that word, unfair. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
