Sex, Morality, and the Decline of a Nation

A topic such as “Sex, Morality, and the Decline of a Nation” immediately raises suspicions that this will develop into a lecture on the evils of immorality and the need for repentance before America is destroyed from within. That is not the purpose here since it is a given. Rather this very mini-treatise is intended as a quick review of the effects of those realities, how far we have come, and how far we have to go before America–and the rest of the Western World–are forced to call it quits, call it a wrap and join the ranks of previous great empires in history’s dustbin.

Morality is something of a subjective value, although civilized people and civilized societies tend to subscribe to certain moral absolutes in order to give their lives and environments meaning and order. Thus, senseless murder is morally and practically repugnant to the vast majority of humanity; to accept it as an alternative to civilized behavior is to reduce the status of individuals to the level of the beasts in the wild and their societies to chaos.

That is a flawed comparison because most of those beasts kill to survive whereas most human murders are committed for lesser-qualty motives but the point still holds true: The consequences are the same for the victims and in human society the unrestricted taking of another’s life undermines and demeans the worth of any society.

Murder aside, other moral absolutes, such as prohibitions against casual sex and even modes of sex tend to change with the times altering an absolute into a relative value. Homosexuals, for example, try to illustrate the “rightness” of their lifestyle by hearkening back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks and Romans and pointing out that in those very olden days homosexuality was not only condoned but believed to be the norm as opposed to heterosexualty. The latter obviously was the only recourse to propagating the race, producing heirs, and having families.

Our gay brethren tend to de-emphasize the facts that homosexuality may have been the preferred route for much of the Greek and Roman nobility who gradually became more and more corrupt as their empires disintegrated. However, it was far from a universal practice and the vast majority, numbering among them commoners, tradesmen, and lowly plebeins, were more traditional by our contemporary standards with committments to wives and husbands, of the opposite gender, and to families.

Gays today also overlook the extant pagan culture, the existence of slavery, the cheapness of life, the popularity of pederasty in Greece, the extreme militarism, and numerous other negatives in ancient times.

Although as the old cigarette commercial went, we’ve come a long way, baby, we seem hell bent on a significant retrogression toward trivializing and rationalizing our behaviors in the last half-century or so, to our individual and to societal detriment.

Few would dispute the moral decline in Western civilization today, a decline accented by the almost total disregard for previous prevailing attitudes toward sex and sexual partners. Not to be outdone in our highly competitive world, younger and younger children are becoming participants in this latest sexual revolution.

Rather than accenting that decline, some would say that today’s widespread, looser sexual mores are precipitating the decline. Whichever came first, the chicken or the egg, the cart before the horse, accent or precipitation, will be only be definitively determined by future historians who will benefit from the advantage of hindsight.

Other societies are way ahead of the game when it comes to what’s sexually acceptable and what is not. Many live in “anything goes,” some in virtually “nothing goes” cultures. The latter would incorporate much of the Islamic world.. . .

(read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)