A Duty to Condemn

Timothy Birdnow

Bad behavior; done once constitutes a mistake, repeated it constitutes a moral disorder.

How does a society set boundaries for it's populace? In bygone days through the use of honor; behave badly and you were shunned, ostricized, sneered at, stigmatized. Remember the scarlet letter? Sins i.e. bad behavior was grounds for public humiliation, public ridicule, public disapproval.

What we have done is replace such acts of public disciplining with the power of the state. Now it has become a matter purely of law, and law is particularly ill-suited for setting a moral tone for society. Frankly, despotism is precisely that. So the law generally takes a hands-off approach (or, more onerously, works for the values of those who can buy the law). As a result, rebellion has been made "cool" by leftist revolutionaries, people who want to fundamentally change society. And it has worked; consider the out-of-wedlock birthrates as one example. The rise in those rates stems from efforts to stamp out societal disapproval.

The argument is, of course, that societal disapproval punishes someone forever for what was perhaps a single mistake. A teen girl having sex one time and getting pregnant suffers the slings and arrows for great periods, and often had to move away in the old days. It seemed unfair to the better-natured but ignorant in our society, and the hedonists who spearheaded the Free Love movement shamelessly used this to promote nonjudgementalism. They shamelessly used Christianity and Judaism, too. "Judge not lest ye be judged" was the favorite Biblical passage of the hedonists; it excused what they did.

And so a mistake became a moral disorder, and our society has accepted things it would never have accepted in the past. Homosexuality, for instance, was something whispered about and not in mixed company. Now it is celebrated on television and in movies, and the army has to accomodate it. This has opened the door to mainstreaming other, worse things; recently a movement to decriminalize pedophilia has become prominent.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/predators_with_phds.html

This is what happens when you destroy a working mechanism and have no real replacement; you have a society that begins to collapse. The Left sees this as freedom; their definition of freedom is freedom to do whatever you want without constraint. They especially hate it when the people themselves censure behavior; they believe, in their brilliance and enlightenment, that they should be the final arbiters of what is right or wrong. They don't understand that there are moral laws that are as firm as any physical laws, and those laws work as surely as the law of gravity. Pull the cork out of the bottle and the liquid inside will flow out when turned over. Pull the moral cork and the life of a nation pours down the drain.

That's why I found this City Journal article gratifying; Myron Magnet chronicles a Boston city official writing angry letters about a shop selling tee shirts glorifying illicit drug use. Read it here.
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_3_snd-stigma.html

He's right; we have to try to reintroduce this mechanism, the mechanism of stigma. For too long we have allowed moral relativism to paralyze us, to force us to be silent in the face of growing immorality and evil. No society can survive without disapproving such behavior. The government cannot do this. Only the people can.

And it's not a free speech issue; we have as much right to condemn as the offenders have to rebel. Free speech cuts both ways.

Anyway, be sure to read the article.