My wife forwarded a Tic Tok video of a Drag Queen Show with children in attendance. The participant’s commentary was vulgar and the behavior was appalling. This event, along with library “Drag Queen story times” and half-time football drag shows confirms that we are in a moral freefall and immoral behavior is being mainlined. Sexual restraint, “polite language,” and other social norms have become a thing of the past. People and society now demand absolute freedom to find personal self-fulfillment.
It was not always like this. The Founding Fathers understood the nature of government and of people. They understood that to have a free society it was necessary to have a virtuous people. This concept of a virtuous people assumed the existence of morals. Scripture embodies morals that have kept nations healthy for hundreds of years. God provided them. But even if we were to disagree about whether God provided them, the fact is that healthy societies begin with strong family structures and high morals. It is only later when they fall into a moral abyss that societies perish. It is an oft repeated pattern.
In the past I rolled my eyes about those who moralized about TV, movies, and pornography. I now admit I was wrong. There was a slippery slope. It exists, and we were on it. Since then, our culture has stopped modeling morality and embraced absolute personal autonomy and immorality. Many destructive patterns have arisen as a result of this decline. As a society we are experiencing rampant drug use, deaths related to despair, family and societal breakdown, divorce, fatherlessness, pornography, abuse, and homelessness.
I had been a social libertarian. I believed that within the church people were obligated to follow a moral standard (the bible). Those outside the church were not bound by our morality. I believed that a “free” society should not coerce belief or behavior. This was a comfortable position. I could live my life and not need to confront the rest of society about its bad behavior. It made sense at that time because the culture was still heavily influenced by Christian beliefs. There was a reasonable consensus about what was moral and the culture generally conformed to those prevailing morals. However, in the early 1990s there was a sea change. The courts moved away from enforcing public morality and adopted a more libertarian position. At the same time society abandoned its Christian moorings. It was no longer possible to be a libertarian. While libertarianism could exist in a society which had restraint, it cannot exist in a society where there are no restraints. Government does have an obligation to demand and enforce compliance to a system of morals. The idea that we have absolute freedom to do whatever we want is an error and needs to be debunked. We need a return to a conservative Christian morality. Public drag queen shows are inappropriate in any venue. While they are a visible reminder of societal decay they are just the tip of the iceberg. There is much to be done.
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