There's been a lot of commentary on the alleged horror of sexual crimes
against children by a member of the Penn State football coaching staff.
Like any well publicized crime, everyone is going to get their two
cents in by the end, with some demanding Federal action, and no doubt a
host of psychological babblers seeking to explain it.
I wasn't inclined to comment myself, and frankly I don't know that any
comments are not necessarily off the mark by a bit simply for the reason
that individual crimes are individual crimes, and we can draw broader
lessons that are learned in error for that reason. Nonetheless, I was
struck by a couple of the comments, including one on national
television, that are highly insightful, and highly unusual.
First there is this comment by David Brooks, on Meet teh Press
MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what
evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society,
you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script
to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene.
If--there's been a ton of research on this. They say people, they ask
people, "If you saw something cruel, if you saw racism and sexism, will
you intervene?" Then they hire actors, and they put it right in front
of them. People do not intervene. It's called the bystander effect.
It happens again and again, people don't intervene. That's why we need
these scripts to remind people how, how evil can be all around.
and:
MR.
BROOKS: Well, I think they obviously need to make the law more
robust. But we can't rely on law and rules. It's up to personal
discretion. We've taken a lot of moral decisions and tried to make
them all legal based. But there has to be a sense of personal
responsibility, regardless of what the rules are, "Here's what you do to
stop it." And so if you try to make everything a matter of legalism
and rules, you're going to get people doing the minimal, and you're
going, going to have people thinking, "It's not my responsibility.
It's, it's somehow lodged in the rules."
Brooks
is, in my view, right on. Frankly there are a large number of people
in American, and Western, society who do not know what evil is, and
beyond that do not even acknowledge it's existence. Evil is. Some
people are in evil's grip. But you would not know that today if you
listened to any popular media. Sex crimes committed by adults upon one
another are excused as "addictions", or the like. And in the popular
media it is now the in thing to popularize and glamorize the propagation
of sexual deviancy. Homosexuality, which was defined as a mental
illness up until the 1970s, is now hip, cool, and glamorous. It's
regarded as an unwarranted prejudice to even suggest that the existence
of two genders with different reproductive origins might mean that
sexual activity requires two sexes in order not to be deviant.
It's also now supposed to be the case that we're not to point out that
the serial polygamy culture of the day, in which mating couples do not
stick with each other for long, produces a horrific domestic situation
for children. Anyone hanging out at court for any length of time would
realize that a very high percentage of violence in the home, including
sexual violence, that is committed by adults is committed by an adult
who shares no DNA with the child, but lives there. I've never seen
statistics on it, but based on observation I'd guess that the percentage
of that feature of those crimes is well over 50%. Simply put, the
"boyfriend" (a term that ought not to apply to anyone over 25 years old)
is typically the offender against a child he is not related to. This
is extremely, extremely, common. But we are not to acknowledge it. The
"father", for that matter, simply moves on, without shame, and women
will have multiple children by multiple fathers, as if this does not
create a set of rather obvious problems. In a prior era, this would
have been regarded as a moral depravity, because it is a moral
depravity, but those living it do not even know that now, as to mention
it will provoke an active response from those whose only standards are
the lack of standards of relativism.
Conservative columnist
Cal Thomas added this commentary
in a column that's running this week which makes much the same point as
Brooks did, but in an expanded form. He starts off by aptly noting
Baseball may still be
called the national pastime, but football has become the national
religion. College football is played on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath,
while professional football is mostly played on Sunday, the Christian
Sabbath. Fans of both often express themselves in ways that are more
vocal than the wildest Pentecostal preacher.
While
denouncing what is alleged to have happened at Penn State as
repugnant, we would do well to examine the reasons behind such things.
Yes, it begins with human nature, but society — buttressed by religion —
once did a better job of keeping human nature in check.
Since
the free-loving ’60s, we seem to have taken a wrecking ball to social
mores. Today, anyone appealing to such a standard is denounced and
stamped with the label of the day, usually ending in the suffix,
“-phobe.”
This is exactly correct, and I'd note was
the opinion of such widely ranging people as Thomas Jefferson, who is
sometimes regarded as religiously eclectic, Theodore Roosevelt, who
moved through a couple of Protestant religions during his lifetime, and
Winston Churchill, who was born into the Church of England but whom
rarely attended. That is, they all felt that without the foundation of
religious morality, no society would survive. Right now we're running a
big test to see if that's true, and so far the results do not look
good.
Thomas goes on to note:
The medical and
psychological professions have aided and abetted the cultural rot.
Doctors once took an oath to “never do harm,” accompanied by a pledge
never to assist in an abortion. Now the official position of the
American Medical association’s “code of ethics” is this: “The
principles of medical ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician
from performing an abortion in accordance with good medical practice
and under circumstances that do not violate law.”
Doctors once led, now they follow cultural trends.
On
its website, the American Psychological Association brags, “Since
1975, the American Psychological Association has called on
psychologists to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness
that has long been associated with lesbian, gay, and bisexual
orientations.” It once considered such behavior otherwise and while
even most conservatives no longer regard homosexuality as a mental
illness, many still regard it as sinful. That theological diagnosis,
too, has been discarded in our increasingly secular and anomalous
society where everything is to be tolerated except those people who
assert that, according to a standard higher than opinion polls, some
things remain intolerable.
Again, he's quite correct.
Indeed, it's worth nothing that the ground breaking paper that lead the
APA to change its mind on homosexuality was written by a homosexual,
hardly a disinterested person in such a debate. It may or may not be a
mental illness, but it is certainly a deviance, in the context of
deviating from the norm. Now, however, a person is not even supposed to
state that, as neutral as it is.
Thomas also goes on to state
What changed? Pressure groups aided by secular education and the entertainment industry.
Last
week, an episode of “Glee” featured two couples — one straight, one
gay — “losing their virginity.” The show’s co-creator, Ryan Murphy,
told Bravo’s “Sex in the Box”: “Hopefully I have made it possible for
somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three
years. Maybe that will be my legacy.” Some legacy.
Indeed,
not only is Murphy likely to make sodomy and buggery fare for children
through television, but moral depravity already dominates on
television. The popular sitcom "Friends" has serial illicit sex as a
routine topic, arguing that it was the cultural norm and to be admired.
The HBO show Sex and the City was a monument to immoral narcissistic
behavior. HBO followed upon this with what amounted to a campaign for
polygamy, a cause with has now been taken up by "Sister Wives", a show
on some other network, in which a strange acting fellow with a Cheshire
Cat grin promotes his "marriage" to three women at one time. It can be
expected that polygamy will soon join with homosexuality in a campaign
to dilute the meaning of marriage.
Does all this have something to do with Penn State? Yes it does. In a
society in which there is no moral standard, and in which the popular
media insists that serial sex is good, that homosexual sex is good, and
which plural marriages are nifty, can such conduct as occurred at Penn
State appear to be far more deviant that what the medial claims to be
the norms? Apparently it can be, according to the media, and we all
should know that it is wrong. But by the same token, a society in which
right and wrong is so debased as a standards will see many more such
horrors. Indeed, they've been going on for some time, and this one has
only hit the news because football is such a big deal in our society.
At our current state, standards are only applied when they're applied to
the nationally known. Plural marriages are okay, but affairs by
politicians are not, for example.
Any society that doesn't know right from wrong will see its debasement
hurt the weakest first. And all it takes for evil to prevail, as
Neimoller noted, is for good men to do nothing. In this case, good men
and women have to say what they believe publicly. It's time for that.
