Hildegarde

One of the problems with writing this blog when I am finishing a Gregor is that I often find myself wondering–when I’ve actually got the time to write it–if I’ve got anything left to say.

I tend to follow the things I’m interested in most of the time less when I’m trying to cut a huge Gregor manuscript, so that I’m aware, for instance, that there seem to have been a number of Republican primaries and that Mitt Romney has been winning them. 

I don’t, however, really know if that Means Something or not.

I have not been following the Trayvon Martin case, but from what I’ve heard it seems that Florida has a Stand Your Ground law that not only allows you to stand your ground but to chase after somebody who is running away and then to shoot him and call it self defense.

This does not make a whole lot of sense to me, since if somebody is running away from you he can’t still be threatening you, but I really haven’t been able to pay much attention, and I may be missing something here.

I know there was a shooting at some kind of religious college in California, but I don’t know who the shooter was or what his issue was.

It’s like that.

Most of the “issues” I hear about feel contrived.  All of the various essays and articles I read would be close to incomprehensible to the other side. 

So I wish to make a suggestion.

There is, at this point, only one issue.

That issue is this:  we have become a country where there is no longer any societywide consensus about what is moral and immoral.

One of the reasons the founders and most of the generations that followed them up until very recently had no problem with thinking that the separation of church and state was completely compatible with legislators defending their votes by referencing the Bible, or calling on religious motives and ideas for public policies, is that they lived in a world where no matter what your religion was, or even your lack of it, everybody agreed on what was moral and immoral.

On the big issues of today–homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and all the rest of it–Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Deists and even atheists all affirmed a nearly identical moral code. 

Susan B. Anthony and most of the rest of the suffragists thought abortion was something men forced on women, and no woman would ever want.  Homosexuality was considered simple vice and punishable by law, and that attitude was upheld just as strongly by secularists as by religious people.

What has happened to us, I think, is that we no longer agree on what is good and evil.

At the beginning of the country, there was exactly ONE  issue like this–slavery.

Now we have the same kind of divide about virtually everything as we once did about slavery. 

And because the divide is the kind of divide it is, we can no longer talk to each other in any straightforward way.  Liberals are convinced that conservatives are really secret racist thugs–after all, nobody believes all that talk about “limited” government,” it must be just a cover for returning to patriarchalism and white supremecy.  Conservatives are convinced that Liberals are just plain lying.  “Reproductive freedom?”  Give us a break. That’s just code for “it’s okay to kill the baby if it’s inconvienent for you–like if you’d rather go to college or if the baby is going to be born disabled and be too much of a burden for you to care for.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand, the man said, and he knew a lot more about all this kind of thing than I do.

I think the sentiment is real enough. 

Without a common moral code with common foundational principle, we cannot survive as a society. 

Eventually, we will settle on one.

Which one, or what kind of combination of the two, isn’t clear at the moment, but I think both sides live in terror that the winner will not be them.

This leads to a lot of public displays of what I’d call “assuming the conclusion.”

“Do you REALIZE,” a secular magazine I read regularly said a few months ago, “Mother Teresa herself said that her goal wasn’t to help the poor, it was to glorify God!”

Shock!  Horror!  The grass is green!

Yes, of course she said that.  That’s what Christians believe.

“Do you REALIZE,” I’ve heard on The O’Reilly Factor, “that progressive eductors believe that their job is to wean students away from the values of their parents?”

Shock!  Horror!  The sky is blue!

Of course they believe that.  They’ve believed it since Dewey, who wasn’t shy about saying it.

The Shock! Horror! is meant to cue the audience that what follows is complete beyond the pale–no decent person would ever believe that.

And that cues the audience that OUR moral code is the only ACTUAL moral code.

And the problem with that, of course, is that half the country doesn’t accept that code.

Whichever code it is.

Here we go, of course, because I’m blithering again.

But it seems to me that the issue is that we cannot resolve any of the other issues without resolving this one. 

And we’re not even trying.