Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 8, 1995 TAG: 9508080036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: IRA GLASSER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
As evidence of moral decline, the merchants of virtue cite a variety of behaviors: the increasingly explicit sex and violence depicted in movies and popular music; the growing tendency of people to have sex and make babies without the sacrament of marriage; the recreational use of disapproved psychoactive substances like marijuana; and, yes, the choice some women make sometimes to terminate their pregnancies. They also like to cite the growing legitimacy of gay and lesbian relationships and the idea that family, love and commitment can take many forms.
And of course there is the ever-popular issue of school prayer. At the root of our moral decline, we are told, is the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1962 that state-sponsored prayers in public schools were an unconstitutional government intrusion on a family's right to determine their children's religious upbringing.
The merchants of virtue want to amend the Constitution to overturn that decision. They believe that if children were exposed to daily school prayer rituals, as once they were, we might at least take a first step back on the road to national morality.
But are these behavioral phenomena the appropriate criteria to use in measuring a nation's morality?
Significantly, every one of these phenomena involve personal behavioral decisions. They don't like some of the choices filmmakers and record companies are making and necessarily, of course, they don't like the choices consumers are making in deciding in large numbers to see those movies and buy those records. They don't like some people's sexual choices or their preference for marijuana over martinis or their decisions about whether to have a baby or whom to love. And they would prefer people to be more pious, especially in public.
A nation's morality used to be measured by its civic virtue - how society treated its citizens, whether justice and fairness prevailed, whether people were free to pursue happiness in their own way and whether it was safe to be different from the majority. Measured that way, the '50s were a time of moral depravity transformed by the '60s, a time of moral advance.
During the 1950s, racial segregation was the law of the land, enforced by state-sanctioned terror. People of dark skin color, for that reason alone, were not permitted to vote, serve on juries, enjoy mainstream public accommodations like restaurants, movie theaters, hotels and swimming pools, enroll in ``white'' public schools or even use certain public toilets. And they were not infrequently beaten or killed if they tried. While all this was going on, children prayed every day in Southern schools.
During the '50s, women throughout the country were expected to be stay-home wives and mothers, denied equal opportunity in education and employment, and usually forced to risk degradation and death to terminate a pregnancy. Not until 1965 were laws struck down prohibiting even married couples from obtaining contraceptives.
During the '50s, gay men and lesbians lived secret lives, terrorized by the fear of revelation. Their most intimate, personal relationships were considered criminal in more than half the states. The disabled were hidden away as well, the disabilities of their physical impediments compounded by imposed social and economic restrictions.
And free speech wasn't so free either in the 1950s. Loyalty oaths prevailed; the attorney general kept a list of disapproved political organizations; the FBI infiltrated them and harassed people whose views J. Edgar Hoover didn't like; and congressional committees summoned citizens to account for their political beliefs and associations, recant and rat on their friends.
Those who refused often lost their jobs, and some even went to jail. Signing the wrong petition or going to the wrong meeting was risky business, despite what the First Amendment appeared to say.
The '60s changed much of that. Jim Crow laws were dismantled, and equal opportunity was guaranteed by enforceable laws for both women and racial minorities. Other minorities were encouraged and emboldened by these startling gains and began their own movements for equal rights. The government's spying apparatus was dismantled and discredited.
The road to freedom and equal rights is arduous, and much of it still remains to be traveled. New roadblocks have been erected, threatening the progress made in the '60s.
Both the Supreme Court and Congress are in full retreat on affirmative-action remedies for race and gender discriminations. A purge of black members of Congress from the South is under way. The separation of church and state, which protects religious freedom, is seriously threatened. The retreat back to the '50s is certainly under way.
But were we a more moral nation when legalized racial segregation prevailed, when women were denied equal opportunity and forced to submit to back-alley butchers, when people were punished because of their political beliefs and associations?
Abolishing these gross abuses of individual rights in so short a time was arguably the greatest moral advance this nation or any other nation has ever experienced. The notion that we are a less moral nation today than we were in the '50s is a monument to historical revisionism.
Ira Glasser is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
- Los Angeles Times
by CNB