For thirty-odd years evangelical Christians and social conservatives have championed values as central to the American political agenda, promoting the integrity of the family and the sacredness of life in every party political platform. But a sober assessment of this noble effort would have to conclude that it has been a spectacular failure.
Values in America are at an all-time low. Not even a dent has been made in the divorce rate which continues to hover at one in two, with women -- once the staunchest believers in marriage -- initiating three-quarters of all divorces. A Pew Research and Time magazine poll last November reported a shocking forty percent of all Americans now maintaining that marriage is obsolete.
Likewise, American culture has never been so valueless. While the Beatles sang four decades ago of not caring much for money "cause money can't buy me love," Travie McCoy found platinum with his 2010 song declaring "I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad , buy all of the things I never had." Eighty-one percent of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll said getting rich is their generation's most important or second-most-important life goal, while 51% said the same about being famous.
Reality TV capitalizes on this lust for fame by subjecting celebrity-starved contestants to every conceivable humiliation, while AOL's Popeater reports that teen girls are now trying to get pregnant just to appear on MTV's Teen Mom.
Worst of all is the materialism and greed that continues to poison the American soul to such an extent that we collapsed a $10 trillion dollar economy that gave us homes that we never thought large enough, cars that were never new enough, and designer labels that were never fashionable enough. With Newsweek reporting that one out of three women is on anti-depressant, studies show that the shopping remains a woman's foremost cure for unhappiness.
With so much emphasis on values, what went wrong?
There is a simple explanation. My Christian brothers and fellow social conservatives adopted a narrow definition of values that centered almost exclusively on opposition to gay marriage and abortion to the exclusion of virtually everything else. In a shocking hijacking of the values-based agenda, these twin issues came to supplant everything else. Gone was any discussion of civic virtue filling our lives better than an impulse purchase, of quiet acts of selflessness being superior to publicity-seeking stunts, of thrift and saving over consumption and indulgence, and time with family over time spent at the mall. No legislation has been proposed by social conservatives to close stores on Sundays -- as they are in my neighborhood of Bergen County, New Jersey -- and strengthen families through an American Sabbath.
Over the past few weeks the nation has watched the Grammies and Academy Awards without one public call from social conservatives for a publicly televised awards ceremony for soldiers earning a purple heart or the Congressional Medal of Honor. Less so have we heard any call for national legislation on a communal year of service for all high school graduates that would combat the growing narcissism of our youth. No, All-gay-marriage-all-the-time is the only social conservative network.
While the divorce rate is at fifty percent and, according to the University of Denver, seventy percent of straight couples opt to cohabit as a substitution for marriage, we continue to fixate on the seven percent of the population who is gay, even though, ironically, gays seem to be the only men left in America who still want to marry.
If social conservatives really wanted to strengthen the family they would propose legislation making marital counseling tax-deductible so that couples in crisis could afford the help they need.
But writing in the Wall Sreet Journal just last week Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention castigated Indiana Governor and Presidential hopeful Mitch Daniels for advocating an abandonment of the GOP obsession with gay marriage and abortion because, as Land wrote, social conservatives "expect pro-life, pro-family legislation."
Indeed they do.
But they now expect language that unifies, rather than divides, left and right.
Abortion has been wrongly portrayed as a religious battle about the beginning of life when in reality it is a social issue about the death of love. The overwhelming majority of abortions are the product of selfish men having sex with women they don't love and to whom they refuse to commit, leaving them abandoned and pregnant. This is not about how doctors treat a fetus but how men treat women. Would any liberal object to a values-based message that has men looking at women as more than mere masturbatory material. Can left and right not join together to propose tough legislation punishing dead-beat dads who embrace the evolutionary model of man as inseminator?
In my work promoting values I have joined with staunch liberals to curb the cultural portrayal of women as the libidinous man's plaything. The recording industry -- once an audial but now a visual medium -- has all but erased the line separating music and soft porn with Madonna, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga all becoming queens of pop as much for their scantily-clad bodies as for their music. The left needs to join the right in promoting more Susan Boyle's who are recognized for talent over cleavage. If we created a culture that was more respectful of women, the abortion rate would plummet.
In 2004 Pres. George W. Bush, although reviled outside the United States, defeated John Kerry because 22 percent of the electorate voted for values as they reacted to 11 states offering referendums on gay marriage. Just four years later, however, with the economy collapsing due to Wall Street excess and out-of-control consumer borrowing, Americans were searching for new values to combat greed and materialism. Unbelievably, social conservatives responded with yet another campaign against gay marriage in California. The result of this abrogation of leadership was the utter marginalization of the evangelical voting block who could not prevent Barack Obama from the capturing the White House.
Now, with a $13.9 trillion dollar deficit that has every child born owing $33,000, social conservatives must promote values that directly addresses American malaise lest we be sidelined again in 2012.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of This World: The Values Network, is the international best-selling author of 25 books and has just published 'Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.'
Follow Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RabbiShmuley
Conclusion? No GOP government will ever outlaw abortion, because it's too good a rallying cry with which to get votes. And, hence, they probably will never outlaw gay marriage for the same reasons. So, all those who voted because of a politician's stance on abortion and/or gay marriage were being seriously misled AND were misleading themselves.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-07-28-cohabitation-research_N.htm
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Living together no longer 'playing house'
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The odds of divorce among women who married their only cohabiting partner were 28% lower than among women who never cohabited before marriage, according to sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
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CO-habitation happens for several reasons. One of the many reasons to cohabit is to "try before you buy". If you are cohabiting for that reason then if the trial goes well and you decide to marry the marriages are substantially stronger than any others. Women who have only cohabited with their eventual spouse as almost all in that category and you see their tremendous success rates.
When you start looking at women who cohabited more than once you are mixing the women who take marriage seriously enough to take a trial run instead of just jumping willy-nilly into it with women who are cohabiting for other reasons and that drags the stats down. Desperate women cohabiting for food and shelter, rebels without a clue, etc. And yeah, they have really terrible divorce rates.
But done right cohabitation dramatically increases the chance of a successful marriage.
That is a terrible idea.
Divorce and marriage are not inherently moral. What's immoral is if you make a promise and break it. That's why adultery is immoral, not because Yahweh said so. Lying is immoral. Hurting people is immoral.
We are changing from a society in which morality is a set of arbitrary standards ("homos bad! heteros good!") defined by an imaginary outside force (in reality, a patriarchal private club) into a society that defines morality according to the dignity and autonomy of individuals, and empirical knowledge about what harms or benefits both individuals and communities.
1. Even with women gaining college and graduate degrees in higher numbers than men, there is a huge amount of pressure to marry before the biological alarm clock goes off. So, are women truly marrying for love, or are they "settling" for men that they believe could fit the parental bill?
2. Once married with children, most of the household chores fall on her shoulders even if she's working full time.
3. Women are far more severely judged by society in their roles as mothers. No one ever asks a man if a job he's about to accept would keep him away from his children for too long.
4. Most women go into a marriage thinking it will be an equal partnership with equal sharing of the load, financial and otherwise. Rarely does it work out that way. Unless she's making significantly more money than he is, women do more of the "compromising".
5. Infidelity rates are higher among married men than married women.
Marriage is falling out of favor with women because their increasing education and financial stability means they can set more of the ground rules.
The declining birth rates in developed countries below the rate of replacement means many countries are literally dying off. Many try to supplement their aging populations with immigrants. Women and men getting together to start families is in fact necessary for a healthy society to sustain itself.
Your comment basically takes some cheap shots at men blaming them for everything and the kitchen sink. As if men have still not done enough to be supportive of women, even with women under 30 earning more than men. I mean "Once married with children, most of the household chores fall on her shoulders even if she's working full time." really house work...really...
Stop blaming men for everything women do wrong. He doesn't do house work , them you should have married a cleaning man. Men had money and they still chose to marry and take on the burden of family. Neither gender has a good excuse other than being too selfish to bother.
I fail to see the rationality of someone who opposes an abortion but supports a war.
I cannot fathom giving tax breaks to the rich while cutting discretionary spending for the poor.
I do not understand having virtually 1/3 of a budget for military spending and complaining that people are receiving Medicare and Social Security.
I am amazed at the corporate billions that are spent funding elections while essential agencies like the EPA are defunded because of a "budget crisis".
If these are our values, if this is how we spend our money, then evidently a mass of the people who proclaim their religion better stop and read the Book over again, because evidently they totally missed the point of the message the first time around.
I guess you have a point. We never did get the morality thing right.
I have often said that a lot of Christians don't have long standing traditions because many are recent converts.
We can't just give up on values.
I fault the churches for a lot of our ills mostly because of the complacency.
Whenever we don't go on the offensive, we soon will be trying to put out fires everywhere.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19101_6-studies-that-prove-reality-tv-causing-apocalypse.html
"The overwhelming majority of abortions are the product of selfish men having sex with women they don't love and to whom they refuse to commit, leaving them abandoned and pregnant. This is not about how doctors treat a fetus but how men treat women. "
That was uncalled for on many levels. First you complain that 2/3 of divorces are initiated by women, then you blame men for the failure to commit. Women have embraces sexual liberation and proceeded to rack up large numbers of partners through casual sex. The women of today are as apt to hop into bed with a man with a pretty face as a man is with a women. If we are to restore values in America we have to focus on the moral failings of both genders and not just men. Decades of endless male bashing have not gotten us anywhere. The sensitive male is worse off today than he ever was having to confront ego driven women who take his kindness as weakness. Female choices in mates have a lot to do with the abortion rate.
If young fertile women start choosing nice men instead of the best looking womanizer with smooth talk and expensive clothes we might see some progress.
Then the women must choose a real man to have sex with. The women's choice of mates is vital in motivating moral behavior in men. If women fail in their responsibility to choose good men then they risk being impregnated by a bad man. More often than not their is a minority of men that go around trying to sleep with large numbers of women and achieve substantial success in doing so. Their promiscuity does not make them less attractive, instead it drives the competition amongst women to compete for the "stud". This moral failing then provides a perverse incentive for other men to emulate bad behavior. Women need to choose good men, and out of self interest men will choose to be good. It is not possible to force every man to be good, and it becomes far less likely in an environment where bad men are being rewarded with an abundance of female attention.
This is a common misconception, especially among reactionary minds. People look around and see a less moral society and then think that our society has decayed. It is in fact the opposite. Indeed there is more transparency, so we are made aware of the obvious hypocrisy of our society. One cannot claim to be Christian yet murder with impunity, as many criminals and politicians have done. One cannot claim to have integrity and secretly have an affair with one who is not their spouse. One cannot claim to be compassionate, yet cheat millions of people out of their hard earned money through a back-door deal. All of these things, however, have been done by those who champion the concept of 'values' -- Our friend Newt Gingrich is a fine example. We will never know of the horrible misdeeds done by many people throughout history, for many of these misdeeds were done in secret. In present-day society, however, one would be taking a huge risk to believe that any secret act (such as consorting with a prostitute) is immune from scrutiny. The era of secrecy is over. Of course it looks ugly now, but at least it's out there for us to respond to and remedy our ills. In the past, these societal diseases festered in obscurity.