My Line in the Sand

Every person must at some point draw the line or define what is beyond the pale. I hereby draw my line in this essay.

California governor Jerry Brown and his liberal Democrat legislature recently passed a bill to require that “contributions” of avowed homosexuals be taught in our public schools. It is not that people of every moral and ethical and religious or irreligious persuasion, every race, both sexes, and every nationality have not made contributions to the good of mankind, but it is that the blatant promotion by proponents of a militantly deviant lifestyle should get the protection of law that goes beyond the pale.

If a nation hopes to be great it has got to be good. The standard of what is good for mankind, and good for me, is what is natural or goodly (Godlike if you will) and is congruent with nature. It is not what is deviant or deviates, intentionally, from the nature of how God designed things to operate. The ‘Green’ movement goes to great lengths to protect and promote the ‘natural’ in our physical environment; but besides the physical environment, there is a social environment, a political environment, and an educational environment that needs protection—at least as much protection as our physical environment.

It is incumbent for me to, as contrasted to Governor Brown and his Lieutenant Governor, stand up for the moral ‘movement’ and public behavior that is at least decent, and live up to our country’s foundational underpinnings of being one nation under God’s watchful care.

In enthroning the value of ‘tolerance’ we have devalued the virtue of goodness. Some have tried to make the aberrant appear to be the normal. Well, it is not the norm, or normal. In the minds of children it adds to the confusion of a life-stage that is already confused by the disintegration of marriage, of the behavior of our public figures, by the distortions of pornography, by the violence perpetrated by the fanatical extremes of a religion that most in our nation do not belong.

I thought the low point of our political history was the debacle of United States President William J. Clinton despicably disgracing his office and his smiling, lying way of getting out of his publically-exposed weakness. Of course our womanizing congressmen as well as characters such as International Monetary Fund president Dominique Strauss-Kahn have disgraced theirs, but their public prominence does not legitimatize their unacceptable behavior. It is not so much their personal moral weakness and lack of self-control, but their strident denials and self-justification that galls me.

As for me,
I cannot say it is sunny when it is dark outside.
I cannot call black white.
I cannot rewrite the English language to call ‘gay,’ a word that was previously defined as good, happy, and cheerful, as anything other than what Holy scripture calls an ‘abomination.’
I cannot tolerate what is intolerable.

It seems we are asked or required now by force of law to tolerate what generations deemed the intolerable. But I ask, would we tolerate a surgeon who didn’t wash his/her hands before surgery? Would we tolerate by re-electing a dishonest sheriff or judge or retaining a police officer ‘on the take?’ Would we tolerate a cigarette-smoking seat-mate on an airliner who intentionally blows smoke in our face or who starts telling dirty jokes to our children?

I was reading a computer softwear license agreement [from Memeo, Seagate Dashboard] the other day and it had this language in it: “Content that is harmful, abusive, violent, racially or ethnically offensive, lewd, vulgar, defamatory, [or] unreasonably offends …others or otherwise in a reasonable person’s view [finds] objectionable [is not permitted to be placed on this product.] Memeo reserves the right to make the final determination about whether content is objectionable or not.” Should not the public, in their schools, be able to make a similar determination for their children? Should we not as citizens make the same sane “final determination” as to whether our public officials’ conduct is objectionable and therefore unacceptable?

In our public schools we don’t need homosexual ‘history’ or ‘contributions’ any more than we need Black history, or women’s history, or Hispanic history, or Mormon history. If the person or group reported on has a significant historical involvement which is related in a material way to a discovery or an event to their uniqueness, fine. Otherwise their personal proclivities should not be mentioned.

If, to take a hypothetical example, let us say Mr. Levi Goldstein invents a perpetual motion machine. That is a significant historical fact and the subject should be explored. That he is a Jew, votes Democratic, belongs to the B’nai B’rith, drives a Jaguar, and is homosexual is irrelevant and need not be taught. Likewise every Christian or atheist who does anything noteworthy does not need his/her religion or political affiliation or what he/she does in the privacy of their own home brought up. It satisfies nothing but prurient interest.

The military ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, now retracted, seems to me to have been a reasonable approach to the reality of having homosexual individuals serving in our armed forces. The same approach could be used in our public employment: Hiring officers would not (and do not) ask about sexual preferences and by the same token those hired would not promote their agenda once on the payroll. Neither should the ‘gay rights’ agenda be promoted by our children’s textbooks or mandated curriculum. The policy should cut both ways.

As a former California public school teacher I would not teach the ‘acceptability’ of this now-mandated agenda to my students; I would quit instead. In like manner, I would not now send my children to a California public school; I would move to another state, find an acceptable Christian school or have them home-schooled by myself and my wife.

So, to reiterate, I deplore the homosexual political agenda that is, in effect, trying to get the dictionary rewritten by dignifying what should be the private behavior of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community with the time-honored words ‘marriage’ and ‘family’ and by trying to get the protection of law to promote their aberrant viewpoint. Our system, traditionally, does not and should not protect, and most certainly should not promote, everything it tolerates.

A few years ago Robert Bork, supreme court nominee, declared that our states’ movement toward same-gender marriage “would ratify in the most profound way, the anarchical spirit of extreme personal…autonomy that is the driving force behind much of our [current] cultural degradation” (Bork, Robert H. “The Necessary Amendment.” First things, Aug./Sept. 2004, 17).

Finally, has the world already forgotten the etiology of what this type of aberrant behavior, this abandonment of moral scruples since the 1970’s, has brought to the planet with the AIDS epidemic? If you don’t remember, it has brought about the virtual destruction of a continent’s people (Africa). I fear, as did Abraham Lincoln, the abandonment of Almighty God of this nation of the protection and preservation of His bounteous blessings should we continue down this path.