Wednesday, February 11, 2004

On Janet, discrimination and signs

By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

Minor thinking on middling to major events:

Eighty-plus million Americans of all ages watching the Super Bowl finally get a sanitized glimpse of what the MTV-youth culture sloshes around in all the time.

And we are shocked, shocked!

Well, what did you think was oozing 24 hours a day into your home via cable channel 50? Just because we adults eschew the sonic and visual assault media that today’s pop culture has embraced, did you really think it was not THAT bad? I mean, your 13-year-old is absorbing that stuff with her mouth open.

And when the thump-thum-thump of the 140 decibel rap speakers rumble up beside your mini-van at the traffic light, what do you imagine the words to the “music” are actually proclaiming?

Foul stuff, really foul stuff, for the most part.

Today’s music, the driver of American youth, has about the same relation to artistic worth as Caligula has to creative expression.

Yeah, I know our parents didn’t like Elvis, but consider the downward spiral from there. At least the King’s hips were covered with waist-high jeans and were not publicly contact-grinding into anyone else’s crotch. I wonder at what point we can no longer call ourselves an “advanced” civilization?

Janet Jackson’s star ornament and Massachusetts gay marriage fiat are water-marks of this present culture. I will leave it to your own philosophical discrimination to determine whether that mark represents height or depth.

Speaking of discrimination ... My hat’s off to it. We’ve been so battered by political correctness and the beyond-Pluto’s-orbit AJC editorial board that we can no longer make moral, cultural or societal judgments.

Yes, I said the “J” word. The mostly liberal bunch whose only working knowledge of the Bible begins and ends with “Judge not, lest you be judged,” just plain misses the point. Throughout the Bible, God requires people to make “righteous” judgments, about their own actions and those of the cultures around them, their own responses and those of the cultures around them. Whoever thinks Jesus is judgment-free or taught his followers to be judgment-free is biblically ignorant.

And Jesus never said anything about homosexual sex? Good grief! He never said anything about cannibalism either, but you are not free to dine on your neighbor. (Actually, that’s exactly what the Pharisees thought he was saying about his body and blood, but most can see that they most definitely missed his point.)

(And, no, to the inevitable knee-jerkers, I am NOT comparing gay sex to cannibalism. Let’s get a rhetorical clue.)

The entire Bible is God’s letter to his wayfaring children, begging them to come back to daddy, urging faithfulness and exclusive relationships as being in our long-term best interests, warning of the dangers of going our own sophisticated ways and promoting the “mystery” of the man-woman, husband-wife union as a glimpse into eternal intimacy.

So, I say, discriminate more. Be discriminating about good taste, good morals, good behavior, good books, good music, good movies, etc.

And teach your children to be discriminating about their friends and how they spend their time, including what they listen to. And you know exactly what I mean: Good parents have been doing just such discriminating for themselves and their children for millennia.

It’s time more of us say to multiculturalism’s evangelists: There are some things, maybe many things, in those many other cultures that deserve to be dismissed, denigrated or just plain refused.

We judge those things to be not worthy of inclusion into this culture or into our lives. We say unashamedly, We have standards, and those things in those cultures simply don’t meet our standards. So keep them away from us, and don’t ask or expect our approval of them. You won’t get it.

Come on: It’s e pluribus unum: “Out of many, one”; not “out of many, so many more.”

So, God bless America. And bless the brothers at Crumpton’s Furniture for publicly proclaiming it. Pity poor Fayetteville officials: Caught between the public rock and their ordinance’s hard place. Guys, I know you are yourselves patriots, whatever I think of your annexation policies. And I know this controversy is a real dilemma for you.

Try to find a win-win here. Consider that having a few more banners might not be as harmful to the public good as the cold ban on political speech would be. Consider that maybe in our zeal to control the “look” of just about everything, we may have legislated too much and thus undermined the real, tangible concept of everyday, hometown freedom.

And if we can’t find freedom in our hometown, where is freedom to be found?