Dean's World

I've always enjoyed LaShawn Barber's blog, but it's hard for me to find someone who I'm more often in disagreement with whenever it comes to social issues. Case in point: her assertion that America is a dying civilization. Why? Primarily because traditional marriage isn't viewed with enough respect.

What I fond odd about LaShawn's piece was that she uses as her evidence a book written in 1947. In other words, a book published 50 years ago--and in those 50 years, we have only grown more prosperous, more healthy, more long-lived, and more free as a nation. Of the dozens of times we've gone to war since 1947, we've been victorious in all but two of those conflicts (Somalia and Vietnam).

For a country that's on the verge of collapse, we seem to be doing pretty well.

I'm almost 40 myself, and I recall reading headlines about how the American family was falling apart since the first time I picked up a newspaper more than 30 years ago.

But here's a news-flash for the dour "America sucks" conservatives: the divorce rate is down, not up. Illegitimacy is down, not up. The "free love" movement ended over 20 years ago. Single motherhood is viewed as either an unfortunate situation or is outright frowned on by most of society and is on the decline. And sexually transmitted diseases are less of a problem today than when our grandparents were young.

Also, isn't there something just a wee bit hypocritical about conservatives who angrily rail against abortion, and yet also angrily rail against single motherhood? So what do you want: to continue to stigmatize women who get into unfortunate circumstances so they'll feel they have to run and get abortions? Or will you do more to support them and help them when this happens to them rather than condemning them as vile fornicators?

Or is the answer just "people should have less out of wedlock sex?" But you know, it's a lie to say that didn't exist until this generation. As I've noted, there were hundreds of thousands of syphilitics in FDR's America. Where do you think they came from? Toilet seats?

I also wonder at the fascination some conservatives have for the ancient Romans. They were a vicious, savage people, given to mass murder on a scale that would make Saddam Hussein seem like a piker--and that was while their Empire was growing. Julius Caesar, before he seized power and turned Rome into an Empire, boasted of slaughtering over 100,000 people in just one of his jaunts into Gaul. Not 100,000 on the battlefield either--no, this included razing villages, hacking off the heads of children, women, old men, the crippled and lame. This was celebrated as a part of Ceasar's greatness, with triumphal celebrations and murals and statues showing in gory detail as Ceasar and his troops raped barbarian women and sliced barbarian children's heads off.

All that, and Rome's greatest days were yet ahead of her.

Furthermore, if you look at the history of the Romans, you'll find that well before they were an Empire, when they were merely a Republic, their values included a casual attitude about homosexuality--it was frowned on for a patrician to take the "submissive" role in sexual relationships (to catch rather than pitch, to put it crassly) but nothing whatever was thought of a male Roman taking the dominant sexual position in a homosexual encounter, whether married or not. And nobody cared at all what slaves did--slaves making up the majority of the inhabitants of Rome by most estimates, at least throughout most of the Republic and early Empire periods.

Women could be punished for sex outside of marriage, but that mostly because of the possibility of illegitimacy. For men, no one cared if they were unfaithful--indeed, the concept of "unfaithful" pretty much didn't exist for men. It was expected that they would have sex outside of marriage, and most of them did.

And here I must emphasize: all this was before Rome's ascendancy as a great and mighty Empire, as well as during her ascendancy. Such things only fell into disrepute in the later stages of the Empire, after Christianity became the primary religion. This is where Dr. Zimmerman, the author LaShawn quotes, is hoist with his own petard: the Emperor Constantine was the one who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, and converted to it himself. Subsequently it became the official religion of the Empire--and around that time, the Empire split in two, and began a long slow decline.

In other words, the evil values Dr. Zimmerman despises were part of Roman society before and during her ascendancy as a civilization--and with the coming of Christianity came the beginning of Rome's dissolution and decline.

So, not only does what LaShawn describe not match America today, but it doesn't match the Roman Republic or Empire, either.

We talk a lot about the Hate-America Left. There's no doubt that they do exist--the Michael Moores, the Noam Chomskys, the Howard Zinns, and the other members of the fascist and communist apologist left. But one of the reasons I turned my back on conservatism was the dour Hate-America Right.

Who are they? The ones who say God no longer loves or protects America because we've fallen into wickedness and hedonism. The ones who suggest we got what was coming to us on 9/11 because God won't protect a country that considers allowing gay people get married. The ones who say we're a lazy, stupid, illiterate, slovenly bunch of uncouth pigs and vile hedonistic sinners.

Here's my question for the Hate-America Right: where was the point exactly that America was protected by God's grace? Was it before or after the British sacked Washington DC and burned the Capital and the White House? Was it before or after Gettysberg and Antietam? Before or after the bombing of the Maine? Before or after Pearl Harbor? Before or after the bombing of the Cole? Before or after 9/11?

And while we're at it, how do you think the average American should have reacted in 1941 if, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, conservatives claimed that the hundreds of thousands of cases of syphilis that raged throughout Roosevelt's America, and the shocking rate of young couples getting married because the girl was pregnant, was the reason? That God lifted his hand and let the Japs blow our Navy out of the water because of evil American fornicators?

Is anyone honestly suggesting that the Marine barracks were bombed 20 years ago in Beirut because America was a den of sinfulness on Ronald Reagan's watch? That Americans were taken hostage in Iran because Jimmy Carter's America had "fallen from God?"

Me? I think America is a great and glorious country, one I'm very proud of. I despise the Hate-America left, but I feel lke the Hate-America right doesn't get confronted anywhere near often enough.