“You are reading way to much into what I was saying. “What 2 consenting adults do privately is between them and god”. I wasn’t arguing the moral decay of society.”
You can’t bring up that idea without introducing the moral decay of society, as most of it started right there.
“I was arguing that a person has God to deal with for his/her sins and a political figure is NOT a God!”
Sin is not the only dimension of this issue. Sin has consequences, both spiritual and temporal. God is the arbiter of the spiritual, but it is up to us to deal with the temporal, in accordance with what God has told us of right and wrong. Even a true atheist (which excludes most of the people who call themselves atheists) could see the corrosive effects of the notion that everything is permissible, so long as you call it sexual and shield yourself from the eyes of…well, it started with “behind closed doors,” but it didn’t take long for it to become “Live Sex on Stage,” “Live Anal Sex on Stage,” and probably a bunch of other stuff I really don’t want to hear about.
Camille Paglia, whose opinion should be heard because (a) she has a dog in this fight, and (b) it would be better for her side if her opinion were mistaken, says that it is patently obvious that the percentage of men and women who suffer from same-sex attraction disorder has grown substantially and continues to rise.
One *very* big element in this is broken homes—divorce or a failure to marry in the first place. The emotional damage done by this tends to make teen-aged boys and girls more vulnerable to seduction, both hetero and homo. Sexual predators intentionally target such teens for that reason, and also because they are less likely to tell their parents about it, and it is less likely that an irate father will do them violence.
However, an even bigger element has been the notion that “What ever happens between 2 consenting adults in a bedroom is a personal matter.” When a sufficient number of Americans were browbeaten into accepting that piece of lunacy, we lost all standing to deny homosexual predators (but I repeat myself) access to our children. It is a very simple formula: homosexual male + access to boy = sore rectum and extreme psychological trauma —> increase in the percentage of homosexuals in the population.
We also lost all standing to deplore—as individuals and communities—premarital sex, adultery, and divorce. Divorce was no longer a disgrace. The social pressure on people to work problems out instead of acting like spoiled children vanished. Sexual adventurism was lauded, even though it causes higher divorce rates. Every time a never-married young person has premarital sex, that person becomes less likely to become a good spouse and parent. And that leads to…anybody? Bueller? That’s right, higher divorce rates.
All of that is harmful to the social institution of the family, which is essential for the producing of citizens who are fit for self-government, whether you are concerned with sin or not. It is a secular issue, and thus a matter for society at large to consider.
“Sorry to bust Obama’s bubble.....”
Huh? He’s on your side of the issue.
“A person who had been properly raised and educated in a healthy society” —— By who/what standard?”
By the standards that were universally held in this country from its birth up through, to be safe, the 1930s. Not coincidentally, those are substantially the standards held by Western Civilization since the Greeks, even though often honored more in the breach. Determining the standards is no problem whatsoever. The problem is created by those who, because they want to change those standards, assert that other standards are equally valid.
They aren’t.
“You are starting to sound like Hillary Clinton and her “It take a village”.
There is no call to be that insulting. If a man said that to my face, the odds are about .87 that I would bop him in the nose before I even realized what I was doing. Perhaps on some other occasion I will explain why you are mistaken on that point.
“This is not a communist country”
False dichotomy alarms are clanging from sea to shiny sea. We are not required to choose between communist tyranny and utter, amoral, chaotic anarchy. Those aren’t our only choices.
We can choose to apply the *reasonable* standards that have worked so well every time they’ve been tried, here or anywhere. A book to read on that point might be Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit: The Intellectual Error of Socialism.”
“people are individuals. I take my kids hunting and you may not agree with hunting. So should I not take my kids hunting because life according to you hunting is bad! I go to church on Sundays, but I am not going to lecture another adult that does not.”
Another person posted the following on FR some time back: “I can explain (some alleged contradiction) quite easily. I see it here on FR all the time. Somebody latches onto a simple misinterpretation of a statement because it gives that person the perfect venue to strut and preen in defense of his own ecclesiastical/political/moral existence. Thus has Satan snuck in to the discussion all unnoticed. The saints—I believe it was a hated Jesuit as a matter of fact—have taught us that in a dispute, the disputing parties have a duty to attach the most innocent and least malicious motives and explanations to the other’s statements. It is part of the virtue of charity. It is what anyone would want from you, and it is plain common sense. Now, there’s a recipe for elevating the level of discourse in the blink of an eye.”
You leapt right from my assertion of what has been a universally accepted truth since time immemorial to the accusation that I advocate 1984-style regimentation of every element of life.
That line of argumentation is often seen, but it’s a classic example of trying to be right instead of trying to find the truth.
“It is none of my business what that adult does on Sundays as long as it doesn’t infringe on my rights.”
That is another of the left’s totally bogus mantras.
John Adams:
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families....How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of morality or religion if, from their earliest infancy, they learn their mothers live in habitual infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant infidelity to their mothers?
Edmund Burke:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites
—in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity;
—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;
—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere: and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Will and Ariel Durant:
Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality—that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Patrick Henry
Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate. It is immutable. And if the moral order does not change, then it imposes on us obligations toward God and man. Duty, then, requires the willingness to accept responsibility and to sacrifice one’s desires to a higher law.
Thomas Jefferson:
(W)ith nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties.
God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?
When (the moral sense) is wanting, we endeavor to supply the defect by education (and religion). These correctives supplied by the moralist, the preacher and legislator lead into a course of correction of those whose depravity is not too profound to be eradicated.
Experience proves that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Think things, not words.
What one should take away from the quotations above is that you have the *right* to demand that other Americans refrain from conduct that will destroy your freedoms, your constitution, and even your country—even if that conduct takes place in some kind of physical structure that prevents your observation thereof.
Destroying our country in a bedroom, or “behind closed doors,” or “in the privacy of one’s own home,” is no more defensible than destroying it right out in front of God and everybody.
“That is one of the problems with Society today. We are becomming a Nanny state.....”
For at least the last 500 years, every whacko movement (which today includes leftism in all its forms and guises), whether a cult was politically oriented, satanic, UFO nutbars, Branch Davidian, People’s Temple, whatever—all of them have had one thing in common: they promise *someone* more sex with more partners. It might be just the leaders, or just the men, or in the case of ancient temple prostitutes, heavily weighted toward a small group of women, or just everybody.
If we are becoming a nanny state—already are one, in my view—one of the causes is that the left succeeded in getting people to accept one small thing after another using promises of more sex. And, to wax unbearably repetitious, the notion that “What ever happens between 2 consenting adults in a bedroom is a personal matter” was a big part of that.
To briefly touch on the religious aspect, wherever you find the proposition that someone is going to be getting more sex with more partners, and wherever there is sodomy, there also is Satan.
P.S. With regard to not saying anything to people who don’t go to church: Rebuking sinners is one of the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy.
So your idea about freedom only for the moral — and I agree with you in part — but if you want to extend this to homosexuals you must also extend it to heterosexuals who practice sodomy (oral sex is also sodomy) plus the FRC must exclude all Mormons from conservative meet-ups because of course, Mormons are immoral nonChristians and do not believe polygamy or violence against infidels to be a sin.
And as you say that “Rebuking sinners is one of the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy”, well heterosexual couples who practice sodomy need to be rebuked along with all the heretical Mormons at CPAC.
(Heresy or heretics who pass themselves off as “Christians” is such a sin that it is listed in the Book of Jude as worse than homosexuality.
Remember, the entire letter of Jude is ABOUT heresy, false prophets and making a comparison between Satan rebelling against Heaven (not keeping to his position but wanting to be God himself),
and then this great evil is compared to homosexuality,
and then, Jude expounds on how this same evil of heretics, of those who have insinuated themselves into the love feasts of the Church, (in other words, have passed themselves off as fellow Christians) are given the full force of Jude's invective:
Jude 1:6
And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.
7 In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.
8 IN THE VERY SAME WAY, on the strength of their dreams these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority and heap abuse on celestial beings.
9 But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”
10 Yet these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct—as irrational animals do—will destroy them.
11 Woe to them! They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error; they have been destroyed in Korah’s rebellion.
12 These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead.
13 They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.
14 Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones 15 to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
16 These people are grumblers and faultfinders; they follow their own evil desires; they boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage.
17 But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold.
18 They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.”
19 These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit..)
The FRC is hugely hypocritical for having flagrant heretical antiChristian Mormons at their meet ups and then not going to CPAC because of some conservative GOProud people.
And I would turn your own argument against you, the whole term “values” is meaningless and was another Marxist influence on the culture in the 1980’s when it came in vogue. I believe Bloom in his book: The Closing Of the American Mind — deals with this false terminology of “values” as well.