This essay happens to be on a topic I discussed yesterday with a close relative.
For the last 50 years, the Republican Party has professed the family to be, as its election-year platforms state, “the foundation of the social order” (The Platform of 1980), “society’s central core of energy” (2000), and “the foundation for a free society” (2016). Much ink has been spilled. Billions of dollars have been spent. Organizations have been formed. Yet conservative opposition to the sexual revolution has amounted to very little. In fact, things seem only to get worse: birth rates have declined; more children are born outside of wedlock; divorce has increased; and more people live together outside of marriage. ...
That's because Professional Republicans prefer Libertarianism to anything resembling morality.
...Genuine conservatives—Old Right and New Right—sense that the future of the country depends on reversing family decline, but family decline at this point seems (dare we say?) inevitable and fated, sown into the American regime and indeed the modern situation.
As it pertains to marriage, the rolling revolution begun in the 1960s is about liberating sexual desire from procreation, marriage, and parenthood. Sometimes this means embracing contraception so sex is detached from procreation (hindering nature). Or it can mean encouraging women to shun childbearing and child-rearing and to prioritize careers (compromising nature). Sometimes it means celebrating cohabitation and single parenthood (a realization of autonomy). The accumulation of these practices, always done in the name of autonomy or conquering nature, has everywhere led to the decline of family life. This rolling sexual revolution cultivates a new sexual ethic supporting what may be called the Queer Constitution (in contrast to our former Straight Constitution), which has become central to Americanism and its ruling class....
Several weeks ago, one of the Morning RadioMouths and his news-guy agreed that "porn" is the genesis of the remarkable decline in both marriages and marital child-bearing in the US.
They were wrong, of course, both being of the Libertarian color; artificial birth control is what got this thing rolling in high gear (but see the next graf):
A contemporary author and social critic (E. Michael Jones) thinks the revolution began long before The Pill:
....Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi - the term is taken from Book I of Augustine's City of God - is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that "as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control - including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail - allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine's insight on its head and create masters out of men's vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened....
The passage bolded above is readable in reverse, too: "As sexual freedom increases, political and economic freedom diminishes."
Look around you and prove otherwise. You can't?
Then find a newer breed of Professional Republican to elect.
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