So, the Supreme Court decided that the several States may not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples while simultaneously granting them to opposite gendered couples. This has caused a lot of hand-wringing in a lot of places, including Kentucky, where now [in]famous Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis refused to issue any marriage licenses – to gay or straight people – after the Supreme Court’s decision. Eventually, she got sued by several gay couples, was ordered to issue the licenses by a federal judge, and she said “nyet.” So the cops came and arrested her and she went to the hoosegow and her deputies are now issuing licenses. I trundled over to Reason.com and the comments section to see both the magazine’s treatment of the subject and the comment pages.
People are struggling with this one.
Christian conservatives, and religious people more broadly, feel like they’re under assault in the United States, particularly in the mass media. Atheism has seen a new ascendancy, whether it’s been the likes of Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith,” or Hitchens’ “God is not Great,” or Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” etc. There have even been public debates over the issue of religion as having to justify its existence at all, not merely in the public sphere, but now in the private. Dawkins and Hitchens have both variously called religion “evil” or “a delusion,” and God as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.”
Meh. Who cares, right? Then came the issue of homosexuality in the military. For those not in the know, the military has, for quite some time, been a place for the testing out of certain social theories, whether it’s been gender equality, racial integration, and more lately, it even led on homosexual rights and religious accommodation – and almost never by choice. Of course, “religious accommodation” and “rights of homosexuality” have been on a collision course for quite some time, as I’ve previously written about. And no one of a conservative-but-realistic bent of mind could ever have thought they would win out in that culture war. Then the courts intervened on behalf of (what appears to be) another “progressive” cause, and then martyrs like Kim Davis step forward to die on a hill that looks, quite frankly, unworthy of fighting over. Yet the Trumpapalooza of the current Republican primaries, as well as the support for some of his more idiotic statements, makes it clear that he’s tapped into something, a restiveness among the collective conservative part of the United States that suggests something else is going on.
So, what gives?
Welcome to the collapse of values. I’m going to use the word values distinctly from morals, which are not the same as ethics, which are not entirely separate from, but not identical with culture, all of which I will talk about at some length. For now, however, I’d like to back into this by offering some thoughts on getting old enough to be an adult.
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I don’t think I really believed I was an adult into I got into my forties. Or maybe I should capitalize for effect: Forties. As in, the United States had the Roaring Twenties and I’ve got the Adulthood Forties. There was a time not too long ago and someone asked me about leaving the Marine Corps and I mentioned I had smoked pot for the first time. In my Forties. I got a shocked look, then the question, What would your dad say if he knew?
At that moment, I hadn’t really been thinking about it (and if you’re reading this Dad, Surprise!!), but I recall saying something to the effect of: “Look, I love my dad, but I’m a middle-aged man. I’ve got four kids of my own, all of whom have graduated high school – at least. I’ve been to several war zones where the American taxpayers asked me to go to kill people they said needed killing. I’ve watched people die in horrible ways and nearly died, in training or in war, several times… I think I’ve earned the right to smoke a little herb if I frigging want to…and I think my old man would understand that. And if he doesn’t – well, I don’t really need his permission.”
There’s a corollary to that: I’m a fully-grown adult, responsible for all the consequences of my actions – and inactions. That last one is the really tough part. It’s like the rider on your “Adulthood Contract” – or the fine print on your used car sale agreement, depending upon your view of this word: responsibility. I’ll come back to this again, but I can remember having the sense at various times in my military career that I was being treated like a child.
In my mid-thirties, with a number of deployments across the oceans away from my family, hundreds of criminal jury trials to my name, and a reasonably well-rounded career, I would sit in meetings with General Officers (I had 14 GO’s to advise as Chief Prosecutor for MCB Quantico circa 2000-02) and it very quickly occurred to me… these guys aren’t nearly as smart as I thought they’d be. When I would point out the logical flaws in some plans, or the likely fallout of some truly stupid and bad ideas (as tactfully as I could), I was inevitably treated with the same contempt I’d gotten as a new Second Lieutenant. There, there, either the tone or the actual words would convey, silly company grade officer. Doesn’t understand the “bigger picture.” The bigger picture in those cases almost always included a violation of a rule, regulation, statute, prior decision, or just plain ol’ common sense.
By the time I exited active duty in 2002, I had given up trying to save senior officers from their own stupidity. But I would always consider the irony that with four children, several close calls of my life as a pilot, a law degree, and some time handling some very complex legal issues, I was considered insufficiently trained to lead anything more than a Company of (roughly 200) Marines. I was well aware that Commodore John Barry, considered (along with John Paul Jones) the “Father of the U.S. Navy,” was 30 years old when given the first commission by Congress of a naval officer, the rank of Captain and command of the USS Lexington. He won the last naval battle of the American Revolution in command of the USS Alliance as the senior Captain in the fledgling United States Navy – at the age of thirty-eight. He would later become its first flag officer.
Now, you don’t get command of a battalion of infantry or a squadron of helicopters until you’ve done at least one tour in your “A” billet (your primary military occupation, for which you’ve been trained, like being a helo pilot in my case), then a tour in a career-broadening or “B” billet, then the appropriate level school (like Expeditionary Warfare School), then back to an “A” billet tour, typically as a senior Captain and heading toward O-4 on some staff job, then a field-grade school assignment, then another career-broadening tour, maybe in recruiting duty or some Joint Staff, then the attempt to get promoted and screened for command, and on and on ad nauseum. We’ve turned the military into nothing more than a professional ticket-pinching exercise, all to ensure we’re getting the “right kind” of training to be leaders, while another generation, my father’s generation sits in positions of leadership and the country continues to hemorrhage: economically, politically, and – most disastrously – culturally.
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For the people my age, here’s the memo: we’re not in charge…yet. But maybe it’s time for a bit of a soft “coup” of those currently holding the reigns of power. God love my parents, but their generation really fucked this country up and we’re watching the consequences of their counter-culture, anti-establishment war of the 1960’s translate into economic disasters and what I consider the “values vacuum.” Christians sense this as an attack on them for their very christianity and they have mobilized for political effect, which makes even people who support the First Amendment rights of Christians a little uneasy. Everyone sees the problems with a theocracy and it’s not just a historical artifact. ISIS has raised religious extremism to new heights, or perhaps I should say, regressed us to new depths, and we have our own unpleasant history with religious fundamentalism called the “Salem Witch Trials.”
More than once it has been said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered.
George Lincoln Burr, pg. 197 of Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (1914).
But if we’ve seen the law perverted from the infancy of the Republic through even the 1960’s to abuse out groups, we’ve also seen it used recently to justify all manner of abuse on even what were the in-groups, a kind of revenge of the disenfranchised, who now find the courts not merely there to acknowledge their equal rights, but also to exact revenge on their former “oppressors.” It’s being played out on college campuses to the level of reductio ad absurdum. (Check that prior link about what language constitutes a “micro-aggression” now. This is happening all over the place, not just in my newly discovered homeland – the Peaceful People’s Republic of California.)
A big part of the culture wars we see play out between Team Red and Team Blue are these dueling ideologies, always with the Right-Left dichotomy, or the Conservative-(New)Liberal dualism, or some other version of this same argument. The problem is that the Conservative positions has largely been dominated by a philosophy grounded in traditional Christian morals, rather than a framing as a need to capture American values, including American Exceptionalism, in a way that appeals to both modern conservatives, as well as the secular, vaguely theistic, but-not-in-my-government Independents who are at the crux of every election cycle.
I’m not just a “point out the problem” kind of guy without offering a solution, but before I get to that, I think we’ve got to go deeper than simply saying, “Houston, we have a [culture] problem.” I hear every goddamn carnival bark- oops, I mean, political pundit – on the new programs always telling us what “the real problem is” and yet I’m always struck by just how utterly ignorant almost every recommendation either side makes is. Team Blue or Team Red can be counted on now, almost inevitably, to see only one solution to the problem: power for their side. Our political discourse has therefore been debased into nothing more than pigeon-holing the other side, “mobilizing the [ideologically insane and inflexible] base,” and then screaming as loudly as possible through a variety of pundits and mouthpieces in the media about the other side’s failings. These always devolve into fear-mongering about how the Republic will fall if the other side is elected.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Of course, any assertion like this faces the inevitable criticism that having reached middle-age I’m now just another crotchety old guy complaining about how “bad things are now” as compare to “when I was young…” But the reality is, I didn’t think the country was “great” when I was young. There was no sense of that at all. I grew up in the shadow of the end of the Vietnam War, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Civil Rights riots, and the beginnings of integration.
I’ve told this story in private several times, but I have a very intimate connection to the plight of blacks from that era, only by a historical accident. In 1976, dad decided we should move to Florida, in large part because his sister and her family were having a go at it, so both families got in our cars and moved to a place called Winter Park, Florida, right on the border of Orlando, home of Disneyworld. By then, there was the federal order to integrate schools, and as much as people have seen these images from South Boston High School, I was one of the likely untold historical footnotes: I was one of maybe a dozen white kids bused in to what had been an all black school: Hungerford Elementary School. I was about 7. My sister was almost 10. There was another brother and sister who were white on our bus (their ages were almost the exact opposite match of my sister’s and mine – the girl was my age and the older brother my sister’s). There were another couple of white boys on our bus who seemed to fit right in. That was it. Those were the only white children I can remember from my year in that school.
I spent most of recess running. And being called names. Every insult regarding my white skin color you could possibly imagine – and many you could not. Every day I got picked on. Not by one or two kids who had bullying issues or parents with anger management issues, nope. This was nearly everyone in my class. The teachers did a fair job at trying to minimize it, but recess was a free-for-all. In line for the slide – “Whatchoo doin’ here, Cracker. Get your white-ass to the back of the line, foo’. Ain’t nobody want you here anyway. Go ahead an’ say somethin,’ Boy.”
In line for the bathroom.
In line for lunch.
In line for class.
For the water fountain…
My mother pulled the plug on the Florida Experiment, as I like to refer to it in jokes with my sister, at a time when mothers didn’t usually give ultimatums to fathers. Mine did. When the school year ended, we headed back to the Northeast. I can remember the crying, almost daily, and questions like this: Ma, why do they hate us? We didn’t do anything to them! They won’t stop calling me names or picking on us! And on and on. She got tired of having to field those questions and deal with the problems of one-hundred years of racial oppression now getting uncorked on her adolescents.
I never forgot what it was like to be a minority. And I certainly didn’t come out of the 70’s thinking how wonderful our country was. I’d had my first exposure to the culture and values war in this country on one of its most contentious and still divisive issues. What it’s like to be on the wrong side of that issue – as an innocent bystander – was not lost on me.
All of which leads me to a post that I stumbled upon over at National Review. While its principally focused on the 60’s culture war through the lens of John Lennon’s own religious journey, the author has some salient observations on this exact subject – the split between Christians who have historically supported racial equality (many of the slavery abolitionists, including the likes of Frederick Douglass, grounded their arguments in Christian theology to support abolition) and the progressives with whom they had originally shared common cause.
… [V]ery few progressives are offering a “Plan B” anymore. In America they are “all in” on Roe v. Wade, along with the corrosively implausible and anti-democratic pattern of Constitutional interpretation needed to sustain it, “all in” on their most passionate supporters nursing a vengeful attitude towards orthodox believers, “all in” on the prestige media and academic cultural heights quietly excluding such believers from their ranks, “all in” on having lowered the limit for acceptable levels of political mendacity for progressives to the vanishing point, and likely, they will soon find themselves “all in” on whatever reasoning the Court offers to justify Constitution-mandated SSM [same sex marriage], and regardless of whatever risk this reasoning poses in other areas of jurisprudence.
This high-stakes politics is not just a danger to the electoral viability of progressives if religious revival occurs. It also excludes a number of perfectly respectable compromise positions from progressive approval—the pro-life Democrats, for example, are now nearly extinct. But the worst thing is that in certain scenarios of progressive electoral triumph, it could corner the orthodox. What would matter at that point would be a certain minimal sense of trust the orthodox had in the progressives. But that, for reasons already suggested, is in very short supply. Whatever official verbiage is offered by political spokespersons or by left/liberal academics that of course contemporary progressivism makes room for believers in orthodox Biblical religion, it will matter little if the dominant common opinion among progressives really has become the one articulated by songs like “Imagine” and “Israel.” Such songs, and such sentiments, are anything but bringers of peace.
Carl Eric Scott, National Review Online, accessed September 7, 2015.
In the next post, I’ll come around to what else ails us and what the beginnings of a fix need to look like. It includes the shocking loss – of all things – of humor by the political left, along with the continual attempt to solve everything with force.