Culture war

Without a shared moral code there can be no free society

Office of the Chief Rabbi | Rabbi Jonathan Sacks | July 31, 2009

Subprime mortgages, financial collapse, MPs expenses: these and other recent scandals are more than mere passing events. They have left Parliament and the market, the twin foundations of the free society, in disarray. What has been lost is trust, our trust in those we chose to look after our affairs, and trust is the basis of society. If we are to recover it, we must ask some deep questions.

Thus far we have had a festival of blame, and there have been some sacrificial victims. But our great faiths teach the principle of collective responsibility. In that spirit we should ask, What has gone wrong in society as a whole? [Read more…]

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Our Adolescent Culture

BreakPoint | John Stonestreet | June 3, 2009

What Diana West is suggesting in The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Threatens Western Civilization will undoubtedly sound ridiculous to thousands of youth pastors, family therapists, and advertising gurus whose livelihoods depend on entertaining, counseling, and selling to teenagers.

Nevertheless, West argues that adolescence didn’t always exist. In fact, it is a quite recent phenomenon. The word “teenager” wasn’t really used until 1941, after all. In virtually every other culture in the history of the world prior to late 20th century Western culture, kids became adults. Not so anymore. They now become teenagers, or, to put it in more sociologically acceptable terms, they become adolescents. [Read more…]

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When did the lowbrows take over the culture?

American Thinker | James Lewis | June 26, 2009

I’ve been trying to grasp for a truth that is so obvious that all of us know it. But it’s not a polite truth, so we don’t talk about it. Yet I think it’s important to say it out loud, because it is a truth that haunts our national discourse.

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. [Read more…]

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Feminist Embarrassment, D-CA

FrontPageMag | Dennis Prager | June 24, 2009

Last week, a brief moment in time captured much that has gone wrong with post-’60s liberalism and feminism.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers was testifying at a hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. At one point during his responses to questions posed by the Committee Chair, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, the senator interrupted the general to admonish him about using the word “ma’am” when addressing her:

“You know, do me a favor,” Boxer said in an annoyed tone of voice. “Could you say ‘senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?’ It’s just a thing; I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it. Yes, thank you.” [Read more…]

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Beauty and Desecration

City Journal | Roger Scruton | Spring 2009
We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them.

Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art. [Read more…]

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62 Million Voiceless Americans

America Thinker | Nancy Morgan | June 9, 2009

Is it still called debate when only one side controls the conversation? That’s the question the 62 million Americans who didn’t vote for Obama are asking themselves.

These millions now have absolutely no voice in the way our country is being governed. No say in the quadrupling of our debt or in the onerous taxes being piled on top of record unemployment. They have no say in the pending trillion dollar health care ‘reform’ or the more costly ‘cap and trade’ legislation steadily making its way through Congress. With Democrats firmly in control of the White House and the House of Representatives, and most likely the Senate, the left has found no need for bipartisanship. After all, ‘Obama won.’ Case closed. [Read more…]

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The Collapsing Global Left

America Thinker | Bruce Walker | June 9, 2009

Conservatives can take heart from the crushing blow that taxes and spenders received in the California election. Six propositions were on the ballot in May. All six passed the California Legislature easily. Republicans in the legislature generally opposed them. The five supported by the Left were defeated by huge landslides. Four of those five were defeated in every single county in California (the fifth barely carried the San Francisco area.) The proposition to limit legislative salaries while the state ran a deficit, however, carried every county in California and won 75% of the vote across the state. [Read more…]

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Making Free Speech a Hate Crime

American Daughter | Jerry A. Kane | May 7, 2009

The hate crime bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives April 29 is an attempt by democratic socialists and progressives to silence dissent against alternative lifestyles. Their incessant iconoclastic attacks on once established values and morality have nearly eroded this nation’s spiritual and cultural legacy. Instituting same-sex marriage and prosecuting hate speech will complete the process and shatter the remaining hopes for cultural regeneration and tear down the last vestiges of the country’s Judeo-Christian ethic.

In America’s brave new post-modern multiculture, homosexual and transgender people will become a federally-protected class under the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, HR-1913. Under this act, anyone who publicly opposes the practice of homosexuality or any of the 30 other sexual orientations as designated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) could be charged with expressing “hateful words” and convicted of a “hate crime.” [Read more…]

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Hollywood to Teenagers: Virginity’s for Suckers

Breitbart | Steven Crowder | May 12, 2009

Is there anything more abnormal than being a mid-teen virgin in the year 2009? Not if you’d hear Hollywood tell it. After watching a slew of teen-movies this weekend, I feel quite pathetic. It seems that all this time, I’ve been trying to follow my convictions and make a difference in this world, when I really should have been spending my time scoring with chicks. Has anybody else out there come to this realization as of late? [Read more…]

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Ignore Our Christian Values and the Nation Will Drift Apart

London Telegraph | Michael Nazir-Ali | April 2009

Britain is suffering because we have been too willing to forget what made us who we are, writes Michael Nazir-Ali.

I have resigned as Bishop of Rochester after nearly 15 years. During that time, I have watched the nation drift further and further away from its Christian moorings. Instead of the spiritual and moral framework provided by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, we have been led to expect, and even to celebrate, mere diversity. Not surprisingly, this has had the result of loosening the ties of law, customs and values, and led to a gradual loss of identity and of cohesiveness. Every society, for its wellbeing, needs the social capital of common values and the recognition of certain virtues which contribute to personal and social flourishing. Our ideas about the sacredness of the human person at every stage of life, of equality and natural rights and, therefore, of freedom, have demonstrably arisen from the tradition rooted in the Bible. [Read more…]

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