It appears that some other guys beat the old Armenian Patriarch and myself to it when it came to making it unlawful to mock God.
Link to US Blasphemy Laws
Yep, those days are gone; we went and got ourselves "civilized":
Posted on 06/23/2010 8:37:50 AM PDT by Zakeet
And I say that in genuine Christian Love -- Love which preaches a healthy advocacy of BIBLICAL Law, against Self-Righteousness.
Here's an excellent article by Archie P. Jones entitled "Civil Government: The Neglected Ministry". You'll learn much from it.
Link to Civil Gov. the neglected ministry
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". (tolerance)
Wild applause for your comments. I wish I had time to participate. Later I will, of course I’ll be late to the party, but at least I’ll get my licks in.
CC, you mentioned people looking at dirty pictures in their own house.
Problem is, dirty pictures (of kinds I cannot even imagine) are in the bookstores, in schools masquerading as sex ed, in the airways and in the ethers aka internet. All over the place. Not privately in peoples’ private homes.
The truth is that the Constitutional protection of freedom of speech was not meant to provide protection for sexually explicit materials, whether described as obscenity or pornogrophay; whether photos, movies, words, live sex shows etc.
ONLY because pornographers teamed up with the ACLU and convinced a bunch of idiot leftists on the SCOTUS (who also found that the Constitution due to some penumbra of “privacy” allows the killing of the unborn) is pornogrophy legal. And an entire generation or two is now degraded (I don’t mean every member of society, I’m speaking generally).
Right now our culture is like a gigantic garbage dump. And porn supporters - and you yourself - are saying if people keep their garbage in their own yard, no one has any right to complain.
Problem is, the garbage is not only in other peoples’ yards, and the resultant stink, flies, rats, filth and disease is everywhere, but the freaking garbage is having parades downtown, on TV, in music on the airways, in all media, and being delivered to everyones’ house via the internet.
I don’t call that keeping it private, it’s on the freaking verge of being mandatory.
It’s at the point where parents who want to raise their children to value virtue and traditional (aka “real”) morality not only have to home school them, but practically cannot even take them to the grocery store or allow them to associate with any kids who aren’t also similarly protected.
Why more people do not see this on FR is shameful in itself. It is a sypmtom of how diseased our culture is.
Yes! And he was right.
I guess where you and I differ is how we understand “intolerance of evil”. You favour legal sanctions, criminalising things like pornography and sodomy. I favour non-legal informal sanctions - things like criticism, ridicule and contempt. But I’m not saying my approach is right in all cases.
Got to log off now. Many thanks for the conversation.
John.
Wild applause for your comments too.
Sodomy and pornography have been illegal much, much longer than they have been legal.
I just want tradition brought back. The legalization of sodomy and pornography are a leftist anomaly which will no doubt be reversed, hopefully in not too long of a time.
The whole idea that “morality changes” and “time are different” etc is nothing other than moral relativity, which is neither moral nor relative. It is just exchanging “immorality” for “morality” and having those promoting immorality calling the shots instead of those supporting morality.
Thanks :0)
Drop by every chance you get, FR is always open.. LOL
“I just want tradition brought back. The legalisation of sodomy and pornography are a leftist anomaly which will no doubt be reversed, hopefully in not too long a time.”
Yes, I agree. Social and sexual history is cyclic. And periods of anything-goes decadence never last very long because they are unstable. Excessive liberalism eventually becomes all-engulfing chaos.
But, as the old adage goes, politics is the art of the possible. Re-criminalisation just isn’t an option right now, because the law would simply be completely unenforceable.
Look at it this way. There probably was as much illicit sexual behaviour going on 50 or 100 years ago, as there is now - but with one crucial difference. Back then, nobody talked about it. Thus, there was no need to enforce such laws which were there simply as an expression of communal morality and to keep certain things out-of-sight. But today, people discuss their sex lives endlessly, both in private and in public. How can the law cope? You are faced with a difficult dilemma. Either you try to enforce the law, which would mean questioning thousands of people every day, or you leave the law unenforced, thereby bringing the law into disrepute. It’s a no-win situation.
That’s all I was saying really. I was just questioning the wisdom of the Texas GOP in making these legislative proposals at this time. I don’t think there’s much public support for them, and they’d be impossible to implement anyway.
When standards are kept low, they will stay low. The art of the possible can also encompass defeatism and the perpetuation of low standards.
And I strongly, emphatically disagree that 100 years ago or even 50 that the same sexual behavior was going on among the same percentage of the population. That one statement is very revealing. I cannot believe that you even believe that. Upon what do you base this?
Sheesh.
Good to see you here!
Here’s an example. Late 19th century Victorian England was on the surface a very chaste and traditional society. The word Victorian persists even today as a byword for morality and restraint.
But scratch just an inch below the surface and a different picture emerges. For a start, there was a vast (albeit hidden from respectable society) homosexual subculture the influence of which still lingers today. Large chunks of the working classes in London did not marry and most children were illegitimate. And as is now well known, prostitution - including child prostitution - was rife, with - according to some accounts - 1 in 6 addresses in London functioning as brothels. And all this at a time when (male) homosexuality, fornication and prostitution were all strictly illegal.
My view is that, in every time and place, if you look for such behaviour, you’ll find it. As the Bible says, there is nothing new under the Sun. The primary effect of sex laws is to make the life of RESPECTABLE people better by forcing certain things underground. But they don’t stop the dissolute.
It appears that some other guys beat the old Armenian Patriarch and myself to it when it came to making it unlawful to mock God.
Link to US Blasphemy Laws
Yep, those days are gone; we went and got ourselves "civilized":
Of course perverion and lechery have existed since time immemorial, as well as have murder and robbery.
Some time periods have more, some less.
I still hold that the same level of perversion and lechery has not existed in any civilized country, say sticking to western civlization for now. I don’t think 30 to 40% of children were born out of wedlock at any time in the last few hundred years (in the UK it’s around 50% right now, in some Scandivanian countries it’s higher), or that children were sexually active in any numbers the way they are now.
Some accounts said that 1 in 6 addresses in London were houses of prostitution? Can you cite some sources, please? MOST children were illegitimate?
Okay, take the 19th century in the US. If you want to make asserions about “they were just as lecherous and perverse as people are now” you at least ought to have the honesty to cite sources.
I’m not going to cite any sources because you are the one making the claim, it’s not my job to prove you wrong, it’s your job to prove yourself right.
Yes indeed.
Tolerating that which should not be tolerated soon slides into being forced to “celebrate” it, having it taught to children in school, and on and on.
Funny, you should tell yourself that. I debate these issues at several sites that allow libtards to share their $.02 and your alinsky style drivel is in lockstep with their alinsky style drivel. Like peas in a pod.
Apologies, I should have said I was quoting form A N Wilson’s book The Victorians, for me the best social history of the period. Unfortunately, I don’t have any direct historical sources readily in my head, but they are not difficult to find. The statistics about prostitution and illegitimacy are well-known and often quoted by politicians when they want to make then-vs-now points.
But yes, a few things ARE now different. For a start, what was tolerated among the working classes was not tolerated further up the social scale. There was an expectation that the middle and upper classes would behave respectably. Remember back in the 90s when Prince Charles and Princess Diana first separated, then went on television to announce extra-marital affairs, and then divorced, and nobody batted an eyelid? In the old days, it would have been a major scandal and probably led to the end of the monarchy.
Another difference is that in the past, irregular living was primarily confined to the big cities with their anonymity, with rural areas being more conservative. But now, a live-and-let-live attitude has spread everywhere and all that has changed.
I think you are right that levels of illegitimacy are higher in every social class now - in the past, the phenomenon was more isolated. But I’m less certain about the age at which children became sexually active; the UK age of consent was as low as 12 in the past. Life was, as they said, nasty brutish and short, and child-bearing in the teens was not uncommon.
It often takes a lot of detective work to discover what really went on in societies of the past, because historians were less interested in recording sexual minutiae than their modern counterparts. Of course today, they are interested in little else!
Such as Trespassing.
God forbids it, you command it.
You speak immoral, lawless words against God's Laws of Private Property.
In other words, you and I agree on what the problem is:
The fact that local communities have largely lost the right to police obscenity from the Public Commons.
Well, I've been saying all along that I agree with the local community's right to police obscenity from the Public Commons. In fact, I'll happily vote in support of such laws.
But I'm not going to vote in favor of Trespass upon my neighbor's property -- because THAT is ALSO against Biblical Morality (and against God's Laws of Private Property)!
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