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Intolerance Buildup
Robert Hart on the Merciful Kindness of Disapproval
For years, my work in Baltimore sent me to the poorest of the poor. The families I saw were not families at all, but single women with pathetic bastard sons and daughters by various fathers, none of whom were going to be brought up with the love and protection all children need. Early on, their childhood would be stolen and their innocence destroyed, making it impossible to grow up, only to grow old.
I have written before about the strippers on Baltimore’s glamorized “Block.” The ones I was sent to help were mostly heroin addicts, many diagnosed with AIDS, and dancing only to pay for their habit in what little time they had left on this earth.
Such is life for those deprived of the benefits, and the true pleasures, of stable and secure family life. They are not offered the true pleasures of education, a developed mind and culturally acquired tastes for good, noble, and beautiful things, along with the resolve to protect an inheritance of philosophy and liberty.
Tolerant Christians
All this seems clear, but many conservative Americans, including “family values” conservative Christians, are closer to creating this kind of world than they realize. They tolerate too much in themselves. I still remember when, in 1990, the first of the new series of movies about Batman received the endorsement of some prominent conservatives, such as then Vice President Dan Quayle, who took his children to see the movie. Others criticized the film as dark and macabre, saying that it was not appropriate for children.
Taking warning, I viewed the movie alone to decide whether or not I would allow my children to see it. I found it unsuitable for my children, but not for the reasons given by some well-meaning “family values” conservative Christians.
The movie was unsuitable for my children mostly because in one scene, after a date in Wayne Manor, the leading woman wakes up in Bruce Wayne’s bed. Batman, the hero of little children, was now behaving like James Bond.
The fact that Hollywood would be so vile came as no surprise, for corrupting children at the earliest possible age serves their commercial interests. But to this day I am disappointed that none of the conservative Christian critics of the film’s macabre tone had so much as one negative word to say about its promotion of fornication, placed in young heads through almost subliminal means. (And I have not noticed many of them protesting such scenes in movies since. Fornication often seems tolerable if it takes place off screen.)
Some “family values” conservatives have become more and more accepting of sexual relations that fall far below Christian belief in chastity, to the point where many churches accept unmarried couples, as long as they are not homosexual. These churches have drawn a line that is simply arbitrary.
That line allows for loose and sloppy acceptance of divorce and remarriage, and fornication among cohabitating couples. It is drawn at the point of “same-sex relationships.” For Christians, it should be drawn where Christ and the Church drew it at the beginning, excluding every sexual act outside of marriage, and excluding unnatural or perverse practices even within marriage.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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