By Ken Hagerty
Philosophical Fragments
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2013/04/03/change-sex-change-the-world/
In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel,
American scientist Jared Diamond recounts a conversation he had with an
inquisitive native leader in New Guinea. “Why is it,” the man wanted to
know, “that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to
New Guinea, but my people had little cargo of our own?” Professor
Diamond recognized the importance of the question and rephrases it for
his readers: “Why did human development proceed at such different rates
on different continents?” His book then follows various geographic and
technological clues to that mystery through world history.
But
important as geography and technology are, they explain only a small
part of the disparity in rates of human development. Religion, culture,
morality — and, yes, sex — have been even more fundamental factors in
the rise of Western civilization. Another professor, the Jewish
theologian, writer and talk show host Dennis Prager, published a candid
and eye-opening article in 1993 that explains the crucial contribution
that traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality has made to the success
of the West.
In “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality,” Dr.
Prager contends: “When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be
channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah’s prohibition
of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western
civilization possible.”
He provides a brief summary of his longer
article: “The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be
attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later
carried forward by Christianity. This revolution consisted of forcing
the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer
dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and
thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism
within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of
women.
“It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of
years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which
undisciplined sex can dominate man’s life and the life of society.
Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of
the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.”
As our
nation struggles to clarify the status of same-sex relationships, it’s
all too easy to ignore the fact that the foundation of America’s social,
economic and military success has been our society’s broad, voluntary commitment
to Judeo-Christian morality. That moral consensus has been the key to
America’s exceptionalism. As C.S. Lewis explains in The Problem of Pain: “The road to the promised land runs past Sinai” — Sinai being the mountain where God gave the moral law to Moses.
Much
of the current debate over same-sex relationships turns on the
difference between the legal and economic accommodations already
provided by civil unions, versus the moral and religious affirmation
implied by the term “marriage.” Civil unions are fine. Mandating the
recognition of same sex marriage by steamrolling over the religious
doctrines and beliefs of a majority of Americans is not. Genuine
morality is grounded in religion. Neither morality nor religion can be
legislated — nor dictated by judicial fiat. They are not determined by
public opinion polls.
In the Proposition 8 case now before the
Supreme Court, the people of California voted to preserve their moral
code and their traditional definition of marriage. Overruling their
decision would allow unelected judges to impose their religious
and moral views on citizens who are explicitly guaranteed the “free
exercise” of their faith by the First Amendment. This is exactly how a
free people can lose their freedom and their voluntary pluralism. No
society is truly free without unhindered freedom of religion.
The
great British statesman Edmund Burke wrote: “Men are qualified for civil
liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on
their own appetites…Society cannot exist unless a controlling power
upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there
is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the
eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be
free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Dennis Prager concludes
his insightful article on sex and the rise of the West by observing:
“The acceptance of homosexuality as the equal of heterosexual marital
love signifies the decline of Western civilization as surely as the
rejection of homosexuality and other non-marital sex made the creation
of this civilization possible.”
Ken Hagerty is a lawyer and public policy strategist in Washington, D.C.
