Moral Fashion
The right-wing meme o'the week last week, coming from everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Instapundit, was that this election was not about gay-bashing. It was about morals and values, and the American people picked the candidate who embodies those morals and values - one of which just happens to be that gay marriage is a threat to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family.

And the right's spin does indeed contain a grain of truth. A key differentiator in this election was the acceptance or rejection of a certain set of values. The exemplars of those values are right-wing Christian extremists, who've won a propaganda war that asserts that their values are morally superior and everyone else's are morally inferior. And propaganda is exactly the right word; the assertion of moral superiority has been sold, using all the techniques of large-scale public relations and advertising. And it has found a very receptive audience in a group of people looking for certitude in an era they find increasingly incomprehensible.

Paul Graham, in an essay entitled What You Can't Say, writes:

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary [as consumer fashions] and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions gets you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

Neither Graham nor I am suggesting that imprisonment or death is the consequence of the latest moral fashions. What this is really about is a struggle for power, as was the English Reformation or the Thirty Years War or our new, modern-day Islamic Reformation. Dressing it up as a struggle between God-fearing Christians and atheistic, homosexual-loving, liberal moral relativists is a more than convenient rationalization tailor-made for a segment of the elite that seeks to gain unencumbered political control.

I'm not trying to trivialize anyone's faith. I've a deep respect for the truly devout, who actually try to live their lives according to Christ's/Yahweh's/Mohammed's/Buddha's teachings. But, like Ken Layne, I've seen and known too many people whose trumpeting of their faith was a cover for the hypocrisy of their daily lives.

The cure for fashions that lack real aesthetic or moral values is to repudiate them. Hold them up to the light of day, examine them, criticize them, and (especially) mock them. If there is anything good and true hidden inside the ephermal mores of the moment, it will emerge all the stronger for the being challenged. And what is dishonest and false will be consigned to history's dustbin.