In a post over at The Other McCain by Smitty, we find in the Comments section this expression of modern thinking [emphasis mine]:
…I don’t what stereotypes are doing your thinking for you, but I don’t endorse same sex marriage, or accept homosexuality because it’s cool or hip; I accept it because it has no bearing on my existence if two men or women want to couple or have sex with one another.
Here before us is one of the most popular kinds of Selfishness that pervades America Society today.
It is believed to be a noble and good attitude, and is held by Leftists and Libertarians and even some conservatives.
‘Do what thou wilt as long as you don’t prevent me from doing the same and as long as no one is murdered or physically assaulted,’ it proudly declares.
What was once an attitude primarily associated with the Me Generation has become, through a very successful propaganda / brainwashing campaign, the attitude of all generations in America.
The Truth is, the Reality is, people in a Society behaving in perverse ways, living lives that are not Normal, do have a bearing on the existence of everyone in that Society.
In order for a Society, especially a free one, to survive and prosper, the vast, vast majority of people in it must work to uphold the standards, the customs and traditions, that define it and allow it’s peoples to enjoy Freedom and Liberty.
When a Society stops upholding, maintaining, sustaining, validating, and holding to the customs and traditions and Morality that are it’s core foundation, said Society — being as all Societies are: fragile things — begins to die. This march to death is often slow because of residual strengths built into the structure, but, like the neglected steel structure building, it will eventually collapse in on itself in a heap of rust.
America, with it’s wide areas of Freedoms and Liberty, is a Society more vulnerable than most because it has living within it an active group of people, a Fifth Column, working ceaselessly to destroy it: the Left, who are being aided gladly by those fellow Ideologues who also want to reduce America Society to rubble, such as the Mohammedins, and assisted unwittingly by those fellow Ideologues who are too blind to see that Ideology destroys everything it touches: the Libertarians.
To not care what other members of your Society are doing is criminal form of negligence, a depraved indifference. Abnormal practices and actions that violate the standards set-up by a Society, though they start out with a small minority of practitioners, will inevitably, given Human Nature, given our Fallen State, gain wider acceptance if they do not meet with a continued disapproval by the Society.
Also, as Edmund Burke pointed out: a free Society cannot survive if the present generation does not honor those who came before it and the hard-won wisdom and stability they bequeathed it, and if it does not honor it’s obligation to future generations who depend on us not breaking ‘the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth’. [Reflections On The Revolution In France]
To uphold it’s standards, a Society must debate what proper means need to be implemented in order to guard it against the undermining influences of perversions [as the word is understood in it's most basic meaning] and deviations unrestrained. Should a practice or action be outlawed? Should it be not so proscribed, but it’s adherents shunned? Should it be subject to Unwritten Law? Each Society, being that it is a creature of the Culture of it’s people, must decide what is the best way to preserve Normalcy. In doing so, it must consult it’s ancestors and make good use of Right Reason.
No Society can survive if it’s members take a hands-off attitude towards the preservation of what made it.
As Yuval Levin writes in his wonderful book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, And The Birth Of Right And Left, in an explanation of Mr. Burke’s thought: ‘human beings are born into a web of obligations’. To the past we owe a well-earned Respect and to the future we owe the hard work necessary to provide them with a future of Freedom and Liberty.
A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.
—Edmund Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France
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