By Selwyn Duke
People's fears often make them behave in very strange and irrational ways. There was a time when man was so afraid of leprosy that people afflicted with that disfiguring disease would be shunned or banished to leper colonies. It didn't matter that leprosy was the least contagious of all contagious diseases, the terror it induced blinded most to all reason. Nowadays such things don't put the fear of God in people the way they once did; what now puts in many the fear of God is God -- and values that are Godly.
Yes, espouse religious values or the category of values that is often regarded to be a corollary of them -- traditional or conservative values -- and you're subject to what amounts to banishment to a political or social leper colony. For instance, when a traditional Christian runs for political office now, many will imply that such a person is unsuitable because he may imbue his legislative proposals with his faith. When a traditional Christian judge is nominated, those who have the power to confirm or deny him will often sound the alarm and warn that he may rule based on the Commandments instead of the Amendments. In schools, elements of curricula that smack of religious values must be purged with extreme prejudice. With the ACLU and its ilk leading the charge, all religious values -- and very often anything that is identified by these value police as a value -- must be struck from every corner the public square and quarantined in the private one.
Of course, it's very easy to come to believe that this is only fair or just. After all, most everyone "knows" that it would be wrong to impose your values on others. You can't legislate morality, is the hue and cry. The problem with this point of view, however, is that it presupposes that the public realm can be value neutral. And, people have come to accept this supposition because of what I will call "invisible values." What are invisible values? They are the secular/liberal values that have been so cleverly and thoroughly woven into the social fabric of our time and blended so perfectly, that no one can even see the stitch. They are the brain-altering additive that is so completely tasteless, that they escape the detection of the untrained palate. They are the ghost in the machine.
It is not hard to understand how it is that these values stay out of the light of day. There was a time in this country when it was taken for granted that one would be a believing Christian who would espouse traditional values. In that age, these traditional values were the default ones. But times have changed and as the Japanese proverb tells us, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The current age is a far more secular one, and the secularists in the media and elsewhere are the ones who wield the hammer. And from their narrow perspective, a believing Christian is a protruding nail -- and one that sticks in their side like a thorn. For this reason they shine the spotlight on such a person, making obvious what his world view is and where his passions lie. The result is that everyone "knows" the nature of this individual's biases and moral standard, and what spiritual orientation or moral compass will shape his decision-making. Everyone knows the person has values because we are told what they are. Interestingly, though, no one explains what standard will shape the decision-making of a candidate for office who is not a traditionalist or Christian, or makes mention of his having a value system. And the same applies to schools. A woman who is very close to my heart once said to me during a discussion about promiscuity, "Thirty years ago you knew who the bad girls were; now you know who the good ones are." The same could be said of values in education: many years ago you knew what the secular values were; now you know what the religious ones are. And again, the latter ones are noticed -- are seen as sticking up -- so they get hammered down. The schools are then denuded of programs containing religious/traditional values for fear of imposing them on the captive audience of students. But as before, no one explains what values are being imposed via the programs that pass the secularist smell test, or makes mention of values even being inherent in them.
But values are inherent in them. To think that you could arrive at conclusions about a political philosophy, policy decision, court ruling, or what warrants being included in curricula without values is like thinking that you could arrive at a destination without locomotion. Just ask yourself where a person's politics comes from; it doesn't emerge in a vacuum; it is an expression of that person's values. For instance, if a legislator advocates aiding the poor through government action, implicit in the proposal is the idea that helping the poor is a "good" and that forcibly extracting money from people and using it for a charitable endeavor isn't "wrong." If a judge rules that public institutions may not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of a person's sexual inclination, implicit in the action is the idea that doing so is "wrong."And these values also don't emerge in a vacuum; they are an expression of the individual's world view, of his spiritual orientation. It may be a Christian orientation, a Buddhist one, a humanistic one, a utilitarian one, a hedonistic one or one that is ostensibly of the person's own design. But one thing is for certain: it is ruling based on some kind of an understanding of man and the Universe.
Now, there are two things that must be addressed at this juncture. Firstly, implicit in the argument of those who would oppose me in this is the idea that while formulating legislation or policy based on a spiritual orientation of one's own design is fine, referring to one that is part of long-standing tradition when doing so is not. Then, there is the explicitly stated argument that legislating based on a secular standard is fine, but doing so based on a religious one is not. As to the first point, let's accept for argument's sake the supposition that one can develop a spiritual orientation that is truly of one's own design. Why should I find being under the dominion of legislators with novel and untested world views to be comforting, but being under the dominion of those with tested world views to be threatening? Why should I fear dictation based on beliefs originated and developed through the toil of many people ages ago and embraced by millions since, but welcome dictation based on beliefs born just recently and of one solitary mind? Why should I shudder at the thought of being under the sway of that which is the result of thousands of years of human endeavor, but be assuaged by the thought of being under the sway of that which is simply the result of a few decades of one human's endeavor?
Of course, religious beliefs fall into the same category: they were developed by others and in many cases have existed for thousands of years. However, our separation of church and state mentality has conditioned people to believe that they don't occupy the same realm and should not influence law. To these people I would pose a question: if these religious beliefs really have been handed down by God, the Creator of the heavens and the Earth and of all things great and small, don't we have a duty to make them the very kernel of our governance? "Oh no," the critics will respond, "That's what you believe, but these things are just the inventions of man." Okay, but if this is true why then do you discriminate against them? Why do you say that the beliefs of man that we call "secular" may permeate the public sphere, but the beliefs of man that we call "religious" may not? If they all saw their genesis in the minds of mere men, why do you distinguish between them? They are trapped. For if these beliefs are of God we have a duty to weave them into the fabric of public life, and if they are not then there is no reason to place them in a separate category. And why should I fear the imposition of the dogma of a group of people who have formed a religious organization , but welcome the imposition of one person's personal dogma or that of a those who adhere to some secular philosophy? I shouldn't. And while the answer to all of the above questions is complex, a major part of the explanation has to do with invisible values. It's not true that what you don't know won't hurt you, but it is most definitely true that what you don't know exists you will not fear.
Another way to gain perspective here is to understand that a law by definition is the imposition of a value. This is because a law states that you must or must not do something, ostensibly because the behavior it mandates is a good or the behavior it prohibits is wrong. And the same is true of rules in school and elsewhere. It absolutely could not be otherwise, for if what a law or rule proscribes is not wrong, why prohibit it? If what the same prescribes is not a good, why force people to do it?
Such value judgements also are a prerequisite for the development of curricula. You can't expose children to everything that exists in this world because there's too much of it, so you have to pick and choose. On what basis do you make those judgements? Well, you have to determine which things are most important for students to know, and you do that by making value judgements about what is better and worse and what is the best of all. You place the possibilities in a hierarchy of importance, and then only teach what falls below the limit of the number of subjects that can be taught.
Despite these facts, the prevailing wisdom nowadays is that religious/traditional ideas about what is right and wrong or better and worse are most certainly values, but other notions about what's right and wrong or better and worse are . . . well . . . something else, although no one ever identifies what that something is. This is truly one of the greatest and most successful con jobs the left has ever perpetrated while waging its culture war against traditional western civilization. First you demonize the practice of imposing values. Then you define your opponents' values as just that, values, and place them in the transparent glass "values box" for all to see. At the same time you place your values in the opaque glass "everything else box." Then, anytime your opponents try to implement their will they are committing the unforgivable sin of imposing values, but when you follow suit you are simply pushing that little known and seemingly ineffable quantity contained in your "everything else box."
The result of this is that religious/traditional/conservative values come under scrutiny and attack when they are expressed by an aspiring public servant or through a curriculum, whereas politically correct values do not. Telling kids in school that abortion is "wrong" is imposing a value, but expressing the environmentalist idea that killing whales or baby seals is "wrong" is not. Teaching that western culture is non-pareil and that it's "wrong" for those who immigrate here to not accept it and assimilate is imposing a value, but expressing the multiculturalist idea that it's "wrong" to exalt your culture and fancy it to be superior to others is not. Expressing the idea that it is a "good" to encourage the sexes to embrace their traditional roles is imposing a value, but expressing the feminist idea that it is a "good" to encourage them to completely disregard traditional roles is not. It must be remembered that I am not here and now trying to convince you that the above traditional values should prevail. I am simply pointing out that while you can argue that they should be purged from the public sphere on certain bases, the idea that they should be disallowed simply because they are those animals called values is not one of them. Which species of values has the healthier gene pool can be debated, but they are both indigenous to the same jungle.
One argument that liberals use quite liberally, pun intended, for the purposes of eliminating their opponents' values is only tenable because of the invisibility of their values. The argument of which I speak is the relativist argument. To whit: all values are relative, therefore, we can't really say that one is better than another. It's all opinion, all a matter of perspective, all an invention of man; "truth is the daughter of time," as the philosopher Hale said. Quite sanctimoniously they will say, one man's meat is another man's poison, and we can't force down the throats of others that which may turn their stomachs now, can we? And this works because they place opposing values prominently on the radar screen while flying under the radar with theirs. They then fly in and surgically strike opposing values from the landscape, and subsequently send theirs in unnoticed aboard stealth fighters.
Another benefit that cloaking their values as "everything else" offers liberals is that is serves to cow their adversaries. Most people on my side of the aisle are very sheepish about professing their values and promoting legislation based upon them, because they have been conditioned to believe that when they do so they are overstepping their bounds. They are violating the first modern commandment of policy-making, "Thou shalt not impose thy values." But it's a liberal commandment, and one that they preach only when convenient and never practice. And realizing this emboldens you because it makes you understand that it's not a matter of IF you're going to impose values, but rather, only a matter of what values will be imposed. We, therefore, have an absolute right to seek to infuse our civilization with our values. We have a right to permeate it with our values on all levels: culturally, socially AND politically. And if liberals complain that we've thought outside our box, we should remind them that values in glass boxes shouldn't throw stones.
