Liars, Beggars, and Thieves Redefine Marriage

Many years ago I had a chat with my pastor, who was even then fairly elderly.   He said that his father opposed FDR's "New Deal" of Social Security, Welfare, and government provided jobs on the grounds that it would make "liars, beggars and thieves out of the American people."

I think that what he meant was that once people got used to the idea that government had the right to take something from the person to whom it rightfully belonged and then give it to someone else that government thought ought to have it more, then we all start looking at other people in our society as potential marks for public looting.   We don't call it that of course, people come up with other rationalizations as to why they should vote for people who promise to take things from other people and give it to them.   They start thinking about why all those other groups ought to be looted by government in order to provide for some group they are in.   The promise of riskless and shameless plunder of our neighbors has made us all less neighborly.

Even back then though, people would not have tolerated the abject moral depravity of the courts attempting to elevate homosexual relationships to the status of marriage.   My mother, who is in her 70s has seen in her lifetime this nation go from one in which the idea of elevating homosexual relationships to the status of marriage was so alien that no one even discussed it, to one in which she now somehow feels she has to explain herself for holding the same position.    And the sad thing is, the descendants of those who first accepted the New Deal think that change, along with all these others, are good things.

Moral depravity does not happen all at once.    It was needful to lower public morals to the point where they would support government thievery as some sort of positive moral good before our moral compass could be further twisted into believing that celebrating homosexual relationships as the equal of real marriage was also good.  Real marriage had to be degraded, before this further degrading of it could be seen as acceptable.   I saw a sign out in front of a liberal "church" which said "We are sorry that gay marriage is reducing the sanctity of your fourth marriage."  

They were mocking of course, because mockery is about all the left has.  The truth is that we had to have a culture where fourth marriages and co-habitation were not uncommon before the population could ever be induced to accept homosexual "marriage".   The argument from the left, as much as there is one, seems to be that marriage has already been de-sanctified and corrupted in our culture, so what's the big deal about corrupting it some more?  That's a foolish position of course.  Just because things are bad is no reason to embrace policies which will make them even worse.   The erosion in real marriage, which has been aided by government policy on welfare and divorce, is no reason to promote policies which will erode the status of marriage even further.   It's a reason to do the opposite, within the understanding that government policy can't go too far beyond the mean of the population of course.

The New Deal generation could never have been directly enticed into honoring sexual depravity.   They first had to be enticed to become a sort of rascal who was less repulsive to them than that.  They did not go directly from uprightness to depravity in one step.  First, they had to be made into liars, beggars and thieves before they could be made into supports of homosexual "marriage."    After a generation or so, it was a lot easier to get the grandchildren and great grandchildren of liars, beggars, and thieves to accept the depravity of homosexual "marriage."  

Government policy for decades has been a continual effort to define deviancy down.   They actually pay women to have children out of wedlock.  They make divorce easy and marriage hard (and so many men are just refusing to participate in it at all).  Consider all the nations and cultures of the world.    Regardless of their religion or ethnicity the ones which do not have a large social-welfare state tend to be against elevating homosexual relationships to the honored status of real marriage, while those which have a big social welfare state tend to favor it.    Attitudes about divorce and illegitimate parenting (I don't call the child illegitimate in these situations) track exactly the same way.

In much of the world there is a strong inverse relationship between the size of the social welfare state and the morality of a nation on sexual issues.  Correlation is not always causation, but in a situation like this one- that's the way to bet.   Big government corrodes public morality because it insidiously undermines the value of our connections and dependency on one another and increases our connections and dependency to itself.
Once we have gotten used to the idea of taking the loot, once we have rationalized it in our minds because we have made up (lied) some negative image of the group we are looting, we care less about how the other person is really doing.    The looters don't care for those they loot, and of course the looted resent the looters- a total perversion of Biblical voluntary charity which destroys both the joy of the giver and the gratitude of the receiver.

Once we have become liars, beggars, and thieves, we have a harder time holding the line on any moral code.   Our own hearts condemn us.  Who are we to say "no" to another group's demands when we have demanded things to which are not truly ours to take?  You shrug at my immorality and I will shrug at yours.  And so the downward spiral of public morals accelerates until we wind up with a generation like the one we have now- not just lost and aimless, but actually backward.   They believe that what was bad is now good and what is good is now bad.   Their reasons for this are hazy, because they are not using reason, they are going with the flow, they are responding to emotion, any reasons they give tend not to be their actual reasons.   Right reason from correct premises leads to truth, and that is most inconvenient for the people our government has helped us to become.

I don't say that you should refuse these programs if you need them.  By all means take the money.  They are paying for it with debt now, and your children are going to have to pay that bill someday one way or another unless things crash and we pay it now.  Sometimes you have to take it just to survive in this dysfunctional economy they have imposed on us.    So if you have to, take the money.   But don't let the money take you.   Keep looking for ways to survive through service to others instead of relying on government exploitation of others.  Take it but work to end it.  Vote for and work to elect candidates who will end this madness before it ends us.