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Morals: Our great moral decline
[Quote]:
ASKED to explain his support for Rick Santorum in Michigan’s primary, voter Sandy Munro said, “Now what we need is a strong political leader to do something to get us out of the moral slump that we’re in.”
Mr Santorum would agree, having noted that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” As would Mitt Romney, who has attacked the decay caused by Barack Obama’s “secular agenda”. Newt Gingrich has gone the furthest, stating, “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have.”
But what are these problems? When considering America’s moral decline, my first instinct was to look at the crime rate. If Satan is at work in America, he’s probably nicking wallets and assaulting old ladies. But over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America’s moral decline.
So let’s look elsewhere. Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There’s just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.
Other areas that might indicate declining virtue are also going against the perceived trend. For example, charitable giving is up after a decline during the recession. The teenage pregnancy rate is at its lowest level in 40 years. And according to Education Week, “the nation’s graduation rate stands at 72 percent, the highest level of high school completion in more than two decades.” So where is the evidence of this moral decline?
Simple – this isn’t the Good Old Days any more… where white men were in charge, their wives stayed home to obey their will, and all them colored folks remained out of sight.
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You can’t overlook polls that say upwards of 1 in 5 people doesn’t believe in god….
*eyeroll*
I think you’re missing the obvious – the Republican Party uses codewords to wrap fear/hatred in a veneer of righteousness. “Moral Decline” means Gay Marriage.
Interestingly, there is evidence of a real decline in morality: large corporations have pursued a goal of individual gains for a select few at the expense of literally the rest of the world. In the Financial world, that behavior is actively rewarded. For example, futures trading – a tool for risk mitigation – was invaded by speculators, who were literally paid bonuses to ignore the negative consequences of risky behavior. When it worked well for the speculators, the price of basic commodities increased, dramatically raising the basic cost of living for everyone. When it worked poorly for the speculators, the negative consequences were distributed, again creating additional costs for everyone. The nigh-incestuous interconnectedness was used as proof that high finance was too big to fail, but after identifying the situation as a problem, nothing was done to correct it.
The final proof of moral decline? Religious terminology is being usurped to convince well intentioned people to act against their rational self interest, and more importantly, against the core tenets of their claimed system of belief.
A much larger section of society has to collapse under itself before any of this crap can actually get fixed.
@Jimn – all valid points. I might add that what we hear as moral decline is actually the echos of the propaganda engine perpetrated by the republican party on a socially (and oft time intellectually) barely literate populace. Add this to the normal bogeyman trash spewing out of the mouths of blowhards like Limbaugh and you get the picture of how this segment’s vote is steered via emotion. And the article is correct in that these people vote against there own self interest, which of course be more difficult if an ounce intellectual brain power were expended by the recipients.