Chicken or Egg?

I've had a question on my mind for some time now and it has been irritating me to the point that I feel the need to ask it of you, my audience, and see if we might come up with an answer. The question is a bit more complex than it seems at first blush, so bear with my explanation. My query comes as a two-part problem. It makes an assumption first, then asks an either/or question.

The assumption is (and there may be some disagreement here, so if you do please speak up) that multimedia in general (e.g. TV, movies, books, music, news, Internet) are as a whole moving in a downhill direction in regards to morally upright content. Acceptance of perverse moral ideas appears to be an ever-widening phenomenon in multimedia, as is the normalizing of aberrant behavior. That is my assumption. The question, then, is this: Is "the media" the cause of this downward slide in morality and decency, or is the media merely the cultural expression of already extant moral degradation and change? In effect, does the media simply report on the change?

I will offer my humble opinion that this is not only a perfectly valid, reasonable question to ask, but also an entirely necessary one. Where does this world of multimedia fit into our lives or is there no place for it? Does the media shape the culture, or is it the other way around? Or, put differently, is the media we ingest daily the soul of our culture or its body, the animating principle of our society or simply its proper expression? This whole issue is so fiendishly tangled together and I would like to have some fun untangling it.

As a good example, I would like to throw out there three TV shows that illustrate my point. One is an already-popular and critically-recognized show called Modern Family, the second is a show to be released this fall I think, called New Normal, and the third is an FBI crime show called White Collar. The first two are comedies that prominently feature gay couples attempting to raise children, surrounded by mostly understanding parents and relatives who may raise an eyebrow once in a while at the homosexuality at play in their midst, but who otherwise could care less. The third show involves a secondary character who is engaged to her lesbian lover. Now I believe homosexuality to be a grave moral problem, but regardless of your beliefs concerning homosexuality, it is hard not to see a connection here between the content of these shows and the current vigorous lobbying by homosexual groups nationwide for legal and societal acceptance of their particular orientation. These groups seek, in effect, to normalize the status of homosexuals in America. So do these shows then simply reflect this particular change in American public thinking, or are they the actual driver?

It is tough to say.

The news networks are famously known for being, at least historically, major drivers of public opinion. So if the presentation of the news can change opinions about differing subjects, then why not TV shows and movies? Do they not shape us in subtle ways and guide part of our decisions and actions?

But then, on the other hand, the major networks and studios are driven by a bottom line goal. Their goal is to make money, and lots of it. To make lots of money, one needs to be in tune with what the public wants to see and hear and then provide it en masse. So these companies must simply be responding to perceived public demand for this sort of content, living dangerously on the "cutting edge of societal evolution," to steal a line from Rush Limbaugh. Right?

Or, do these two things go hand in hand? Was the proverbial chicken first or the egg?

Feel free to leave your thoughts below!


Image by LGPER, via Wikipedia.

Steve Mosher on Obama and 'Gay Marriage'

This is an article reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.

America’s First Gay President Embraces Same-Sex Marriage

by Steven W. Mosher

Newsweek magazine is so proud of Obama’s self-described “evolution” on the issue of same-sex marriage that it has anointed him “America’s First Gay President.”

America’s voters, at least those in key swing states, seem much less impressed. As I told friends at the Canadian March for Life, which took place in Ottawa last week, Barry’s latest flip-flop will almost certainly cost him North Carolina, Indiana, and my home state of Virginia. Other states, like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, are now in play as well. If these go for Romney, then Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage will have cost him the election.

If this particular evolution does result in the President’s political extinction, it may strike some as a kind of poetic justice. After all, the behavior that he is endorsing is an evolutionary dead end. I mean this in the literal, Biology 101 sense.

Leave aside questions of morality for the moment. Leave aside the question of whether homosexual acts dramatically shorten one’s lifespan because of the diseases that attend the homosexual act. (Even homosexual activists admit that this is so; they just quibble about the exact number of years that exposure to the blood and fecal matter of multiple partners shortens your lifespan.)

What I mean by evolutionary dead end is that each and every homosexual coupling is, by definition, sterile. No matter how many times they copulate, homosexual couplings —whether male on male, or female on female — cannot generate new life. Do not hold your breath waiting for Barney Frank to send out a birth announcement.

Homosexual activists say that the ability to procreate is unimportant. They likewise deny that an important function of marriage is to promote responsible childbearing and child-rearing. From an evolutionary point of view, however, such objections are complete, utter nonsense.

To illustrate this, let us do a simple thought experiment. Let us imagine that Obama’s embrace of homosexual marriage is wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that by the end of his second term, heterosexual marriage has fallen into desuetude, and everyone in America has entered into a homosexual union. (I know how unpleasant a prospect this may seem to some, but bear with me for a moment).

So what happens to the United States then? The first thing that would happen is that the birth rate would drop to effectively zero (not exactly zero because I assume that some few lesbians would continue to artificially inseminate themselves). Then the population of the United States would begin to die off, rapidly. By the end of the century, nearly every single American would be dead.

Population control enthusiasts have long promoted homosexuality precisely because they understand its inherent sterility. This is why Frederick S. Jaffe, for example, in his October 1970 article in Perspectives, suggested that one way to reduce the American birth rate would be to encourage homosexual behavior. Jaffe understood that gay and lesbian sex was barren.

But the population bomb has fizzled, and the recession has driven birth rates in the U.S. below replacement.

The only future a family — or a nation — has is its children. America will only continue to thrive if each generation replaces itself. The American experiment in self-government will fail without people, who are, after all, its first prerequisite.

President Reagan famously remarked about abortion that all those in favor of it have already been born. The same may be said about same-sex marriage: All those in favor of it have already been born.

To the extent that Obama succeeds in promoting same-sex marriage, even fewer babies will be.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute.

A Different Perspective

I recently came across a truly intriguing article concerning the ever politically and religiously sticky topic of homosexuality. I will say very little here, and let you just read and tell me what you think. I personally found it quite powerful.