by Kitty Testa
My father once told me, “The pendulum swings.” We were talking about history, and I was very young at the time. He explained how the licentious 1920s were a response to the prudish Victorian Era, how the conservative post-WWII of the 1950s was a rejection of the risk-taking 1920s that led to the Great Depression. The hippies of the 1960s were a response to the rigidity of his own generation, although he was unnerved by their libertine ways. In response to the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the 1960s came a group that feared the end of America as we knew it—an end to the nuclear family, an end to a Christian nation. And thus was born The Moral Majority.
What was The Moral Majority? Well, in its heyday critics said it was neither moral nor a majority, but it was a powerful political force in the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. The group was led by Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist Christian evangelical pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a congregation that served as the template for megachurches that would spring up all over America in the 1990s. More importantly, the group was a social and political powerhouse which sought to legislate conservative Judeo-Christian values into codified law. Like all political movements, The Moral Majority had its bogeymen and positioned itself as fighting evil forces in an epic battle for the nation’s virtue.
What Falwell and his followers failed to see was what my father told me: “The pendulum swings.”
Well into the 1990s, the opposition to The Moral Majority repeatedly accused the Christian right of attempting to “legislate morality.” I remember a heartwarming moment in 1999, when Eleanor Clift was a guest on Hannity and Colmes. She trotted out the cliché, and Sean Hannity hit back at her, saying it was liberals who were trying to legislate morality, which left Clift flustered and unable to answer. I had come to see the pendulum swinging back the other way, and was glad that someone else saw it too.
While the modern Left shares few values with those who supported The Moral Majority, their goal is actually not dissimilar: make everyone live by their code of virtue, whether they like it or not. Coercion begets backlash and rejection, and by 2017, the fears of The Moral Majority look prophetic.
The Left has tremendous sway in popular culture, but it was battered at the ballot box in 2016. The Left has proliferated its platform of virtues and has demanded adherence and obedience to its political correctness, which it has successfully codified into regulations, statues and ordinances all over the country.
Here are seven ways the Left is the New Moral Majority.
1. Can’t take a joke
In November, 1983, Hustler Magazine ran a mock advertisement featuring Jerry Falwell as an incestuous drunk. Falwell was so furious that he sued its publisher, Larry Flynt, seeking damages including intentional infliction of emotional distress. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where Flynt prevailed.
Comedy—especially edgy comedy that questions the powers that be—has always been an agent for change. It was especially an agent for change among liberals over the past 50 years, taking aim at the status quo and the powers that be, making people uncomfortable. Ethnic comedians, who often made fun of their stereotypes, were especially effective at creating bridges among different groups, laughing at, but also humanizing themselves. Through comedy we fought the battle of the sexes, laughing about our mutual misperceptions. Comedy was a way to explore explosive issues without anger.
Well guess what—we’re not supposed to do that anymore.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a list of things we’re not supposed to joke about anymore (a list in a list, as it were).
- Sex
- Drunk Sex
- Sexual Innuendo
- Sexual preference
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- Gender Identity
- Women
- Being too fat
- Being too thin
- Anybody who is a member of an ethnic, racial or religious minority
We might as well just destroy all evidence of the last 50 years of comedy.
So who can we laugh at? Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman getting raped, and basically anyone who is a member of a group that even remotely resembles the people who supported The Moral Majority, mainly white Christian men. This is dire, because—trust me—they’re just not that funny.
(Did I just make fun of Christian white guys? Oops!)
2. Espouses strict codes of virtue
The Moral Majority’s code of virtue was culturally familiar and contained in the Bible, which made it, at least, accessible. The Left’s current code of virtue is confusing. This is best illustrated by a guy named Adam Smith, who recorded an incident in which he berated a cashier at Chik-Fil-A because of the owner’s expressed belief in traditional marriage. Smith posted the video on Facebook, undoubtedly expecting to be heralded as a champion of the Left. What Smith didn’t take into account was that he berated a minimum wage employee, and he took all manner of backlash from the Left for having shamed her over her boss’s religious beliefs. (See #4: Shaming)
Oh, wait! Something else we can’t laugh about: Minimum wage employees.
Smith lost his $200k job as a CFO and over $1 million in stock options and his family is reportedly on food stamps—all because he tried to live up to the virtues of the Left and failed.
You see, like gender, the virtue code of the Left is fluid. You never really know what’s allowed and what isn’t, but the mob is there to hang you if you violate a rule that wasn’t even written down.
3. Is obsessed with rules about sex
The Moral Majority supported an attitude that sex was for marriage only and that men and women had distinct roles within the family structure. All other sexual activity was to be forbidden.
As far as the Left is concerned, you can—and should—have sex with any other consenting adult whenever you want, as long as one party doesn’t actually pursue the other, that the word, “No,” is not uttered at any time before or during any sexual act, and that each partner should get permission from the other before doing anything remotely unexpected. In the 1987 movie Cherry 2000, men had turned away from real women and instead purchased sexbots to meet their relationship needs. The rare human-to-human sexual encounters required legal contracts prior to sexual activity and all parameters of the hook-up were negotiated beforehand. And the movie was set in the year—you guessed it—2017.
4. Engages in shaming
The Moral Majority shamed those who lived non-traditional lives. They shamed homosexuals, single mothers, women who had jobs—or worse yet, careers. They shamed men who didn’t attend church with their families. They were into shaming.
Shaming, for those on the Left, is a fine art. There are many rules—far more rules than in the Bible. You can’t fat shame or slut shame a woman, but you must shame her if she didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. You can mom shame her if she praises her child who just played a Beethoven sonata on the piano while neglecting to praise her other child who just scribbled all over the bathroom wall with a permanent marker. You can shame her if she lets her kids go to the park alone, unless she was at work and couldn’t afford childcare. Like I said, it’s confusing.
Shaming is, in fact, a hallmark tool of the Left. All of those post-election protests? An act of shaming those who voted for Trump. The black Chicago teenagers who kidnapped a white, disabled suburban kid, bound him, beat him and made him drink toilet water? Shaming. As a matter of fact, I believe the Left will be so busy shaming everyone they can think of for reasons yet to be invented that they will forget to rebuild their political apparatus into the force it once was.
5. Wants to legislate morality
Just like The Moral Majority, the modern Left sees a direct correlation between what is legal and what is moral. That is why both groups have lobbied tirelessly to get legislators to pass laws that serve their moral agendas, only the Left has been far more successful in accomplishing its goals.
This is why we have “hate crimes” in which punishment for a violent act is increased based on the thoughts that may be in the perpetrator’s mind. This is why there was a battle over “marriage equality” instead of addressing whether the government has any role in marriage whatsoever. This is why we have the new soda tax in Philadelphia and a national campaign to eradicate vaping. It’s all about punishing people that don’t live the way they’re supposed to.
While they’re not busy banning everything from guns to light bulbs, they will gladly scream into your face, “Love trumps hate!”
6. Prefers censorship to discussion
The Moral Majority fought to get books banned from libraries and eradicate pornography.
The Left has its own ways of censoring, especially on college campuses. If a professor makes a comment that the students find objectionable, they march on the administration and demand that the professor be terminated. If they don’t like a statue of a dead white guy, they march on the administration and demand it be taken down. And God help you if you refuse to use a person’s preferred gender pronoun.
If the Left finds you controversial—that would be counter to their culture—expect to get banned on Twitter, or get your radio show cancelled, or get fired. Also do not expect to be invited to speak on campus.
The New Moral Majority is less tolerant of free speech than the original. You can test that theory just by uttering, “Taxation is theft.”
7. Believes dissenters are evil
Both The Moral Majority and the Left see those who resist them as evil agents who must be stopped.
The Moral Majority found their demons among the entertainment industry, those who manufacture and heavily influence popular culture. It was they who Falwell found to be circulating dangerous, disruptive ideas.
But the Left is no different, except that they find their demons in fly-over country, an interior land with inferior people who are evil and whose ideas must be eradicated.
Voted for Trump? You’re evil. Against abortion? You’re evil. Are a skeptic about manmade global warming, climate change, or climate disruption? You’re evil. Go to church? You’re really evil.
But coercion will—ultimately—result in rejection and rebellion. The Left is beginning to suffer the same fate as The Moral Majority.
If your ideas about society and culture and how things should be are dear to you, don’t kill those ideas by trying to steamroll over your neighbors with legislation and regulation. If your ideas bear great fruits, advertise them, espouse them, shout them from the highest mountain and tweet to your heart’s content. Our culture should be swarming with opposing viewpoints, ideas for sale, if you will, diverse perspectives of thought that lead to knowledge, understanding and enlightenment.
Only in my dreams. For now, the pendulum swings.