Culture war

When It Comes to Sex, the Left Hates Science

SalvoMag | by Hunter Baker | Autumn 2009

It has become an article of faith among those on the secular left that they are the natural allies of scientific rationality. At the time of the 2004 election, both Robert Reich and Garry Wills styled religious conservatives as the enemies of science who threatened to bring in a new dark age. This appraisal, excessively flattering and self-congratulatory to themselves, while unfairly condemnatory of others, arises from two on-going campaigns.

The first, which has been running far longer than any play on Broadway, is the organized effort by partisans of Darwinism to eviscerate the social influence of Christianity. [Read more…]

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The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen

Townhall | Dennis Prager | Sep. 1, 2009

Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care (“ObamaCare”) do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes. [Read more…]

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The U.N.’s Shocking Sexuality Guidelines

American Thinker | Janice Shaw Crouse | Aug. 30, 2009

During the summer slump, two United Nations agencies — United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) — issued highly controversial new guidelines for sexuality education of children around the world. These groups have a long history of pushing “reproductive health care,” and the new report, International Guidelines on Sexuality Education, builds on an earlier report released by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to promote the “need and entitlement” for sexuality education for children beginning at age five. [Read more…]

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I Thought ‘Dissent Is Patriotic’

Townhall.com | Dennis Prager | Aug. 11, 2009

Living in liberal Los Angeles, I am surrounded by people — and bumper stickers — I do not agree with.

One of the more popular liberal bumper stickers of the last decade tells us “Dissent is Patriotic.” Now, as it happens, it is impossible to truly disagree with that phrase, not because it is self-evidently true, but because it is self-evidently meaningless. As are most left-wing bumper stickers. [Read more…]

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The Death of Conscience

Townhall.com | Rebecca Hagelin | Aug. 4, 2009

Our teenagers are more sexually active than any generation of youth before them. They also are consuming more pornography and compromising basic moral standards more often. It seems that many of them have lost not only their innocence, but their conscience, too.

The plethora of negative and immoral behaviors glorified by a media world that’s gone stark raving mad — combined with graphic, non-judgmental sex education and a highly sexualized culture in general — causes many of them to lose understanding of what is wrong and what is right. [Read more…]

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Without a shared moral code there can be no free society

Office of the Chief Rabbi | Rabbi Jonathan Sacks | July 31, 2009

Subprime mortgages, financial collapse, MPs expenses: these and other recent scandals are more than mere passing events. They have left Parliament and the market, the twin foundations of the free society, in disarray. What has been lost is trust, our trust in those we chose to look after our affairs, and trust is the basis of society. If we are to recover it, we must ask some deep questions.

Thus far we have had a festival of blame, and there have been some sacrificial victims. But our great faiths teach the principle of collective responsibility. In that spirit we should ask, What has gone wrong in society as a whole? [Read more…]

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Our Adolescent Culture

BreakPoint | John Stonestreet | June 3, 2009

What Diana West is suggesting in The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Threatens Western Civilization will undoubtedly sound ridiculous to thousands of youth pastors, family therapists, and advertising gurus whose livelihoods depend on entertaining, counseling, and selling to teenagers.

Nevertheless, West argues that adolescence didn’t always exist. In fact, it is a quite recent phenomenon. The word “teenager” wasn’t really used until 1941, after all. In virtually every other culture in the history of the world prior to late 20th century Western culture, kids became adults. Not so anymore. They now become teenagers, or, to put it in more sociologically acceptable terms, they become adolescents. [Read more…]

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When did the lowbrows take over the culture?

American Thinker | James Lewis | June 26, 2009

I’ve been trying to grasp for a truth that is so obvious that all of us know it. But it’s not a polite truth, so we don’t talk about it. Yet I think it’s important to say it out loud, because it is a truth that haunts our national discourse.

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. [Read more…]

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Feminist Embarrassment, D-CA

FrontPageMag | Dennis Prager | June 24, 2009

Last week, a brief moment in time captured much that has gone wrong with post-’60s liberalism and feminism.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers was testifying at a hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. At one point during his responses to questions posed by the Committee Chair, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, the senator interrupted the general to admonish him about using the word “ma’am” when addressing her:

“You know, do me a favor,” Boxer said in an annoyed tone of voice. “Could you say ‘senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?’ It’s just a thing; I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it. Yes, thank you.” [Read more…]

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Beauty and Desecration

City Journal | Roger Scruton | Spring 2009
We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them.

Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art. [Read more…]

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