The More Things Change

Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club makes the interesting point that there's every bit as much moral judgmentalism infusing the public square as ever there was, but that what is considered moral and immoral is very much different today than, say, forty years ago. He writes:

Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area. It may now be a crime to quote the Bible.

For example, in May of 2010 a British preacher [a Mr. McAlpine]was arrested for handing out leaflets saying that homosexuality was a sin. A policeman approached “to warn him they had received complaints and that if he made any racist or homophobic comments he would be arrested.”

I told him homosexuality is a sin, and he told me “I am a homosexual, I find that offensive, and I’m also the liaison officer for the bisexual-lesbian-gay-transsexual community”,’ he said yesterday. ‘I told him it was still a sin.’

Mr Adams last year represented Cumbria Police at the Gay Pride march in Manchester. On the social networking site MySpace, he describes his orientation as gay and his religion as atheist.

After the warning, Mr McAlpine took over preaching for 20 minutes, although he claims he did not cover homosexuality. But while he talked to a passer-by the PCSO radioed for assistance and he was arrested by uniformed officers.

He was taken to a police station, had his pockets emptied and his mobile phone taken along with his belt and shoes, and was kept in the cells for seven hours where he sang hymns to keep his spirits up.

It is exactly the same process that might have occurred fifty years ago but with a policeman warning a homosexual he could not distribute leaflets advocating sodomy. What has changed isn’t that people are being warned off for their beliefs. What is different is which beliefs they are being warned against. The Ins and the Outs have changed places, but he door remains the same. Wikipedia writes that “views on public morality do change over time,” but whether public morality itself can ever be abolished is an open question.

One of the drivers of the new public morality is who can fight back. British policemen do not go around telling Muslim imams not to preach against homosexuality because such preachers may take strenuous exception to their warnings. But the rules of the new morality are often capricious, unstated or simply arcane.

Fernandez has a point. You'd risk being shouted down were you to suggest publicly that almost any form of sexual expression is wrong. You'd be called a prude, a bigot, and intolerant. On the other hand, progressive society is very intolerant of people who don't belong to any of the groups approved or favored by the contemporary standard-setters. If one is a smoker, a meat-eater, or wears furs, one can expect to meet with a certain measure of social opprobrium in our more liberal precincts. Likewise if one is a Catholic or fundamentalist or a pro-lifer.

Tolerance of other peoples' preferences and beliefs often extends only to those who think the way our left-leaning elites think. All others merit society's anathema and execration.