“For the first time in American history,” the article begins, an American professional “from a major sport” has outed himself as a homosexual. The media is totally abuzz about it all, calling him “brave,” “avante-garde,” a “hero,” a “front-running leader” in the “battle” for the rights of minorities. He is featured, next morning, on the national morning news programs, in multi-segments. Many are assigning him the number “42,” comparing him to another professional athlete who wore that number on his jersey when he broke the color barrier in major league baseball. A past president applauds him. The current president telephones him and says he is“extremely proud” of our new hero, and is sure that the athlete’s admitting his homosexual sex preferences bodes well for the country in many ways. The president’s wife tweets her effusive congratulations. One sports writer says the NBA commissioner should “demand” that the athlete be given another contract (he is a free-agent) to be fair. The young man, then, would have two “firsts,” the second one being given an undeserved job as a professional athlete solely to affirm current- but-ever-changing political correctness.
One ponders this question: if the athlete (let us suppose, for analysis sake) was to change his opinion later about homosexuality and go “straight,” one ponders whether the press and the illuminati would immediately jump on his new bandwagon in lock-step. The president has no word of encouragement to say to a well-known professional football player—a man of sterling character who has routinely visited, on his own dollar, various foreign countries to help the helpless—when he was pilloried by the press for certain public displays of his Christian faith. What we need not ponder is what the president would say, or when he would say it, if the NFL player outed himself as a practicing homosexual.
I have no personal animus toward the athlete. His sexuality is his (I almost said “private”) business. I wish him all the best in his sports career, and in his life. I wish, as well, that he had not felt the necessity of inviting the nation into another bedroom.
I ponder something else. Why is it that the sexually odd, the outré, are touted while traditional morality is consistently trivialized? And this: does all this buzz—not of the activity of a single individual but the national response to it— say anything about moral decline in America? St. Paul’s analysis of another culture comes to mind. He said of them, “…whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame.” He added, “Whose end is destruction.” (Philippians 3:19)
I am reading, again, Jacques Barzun’s excellent “From Dawn to Decadence,” a celebrated analysis of the last five hundred years of western civilization. He is at great pains to say that “decadence” has nothing to do with morals, but with art, music, architecture, the “aging” of attitudes about institutions, the prevalence of a general cultural malaise, etc. It is as if, at the base of things, nobody can really say what is right or wrong, what is ethical or unethical. That would be entering into subjective sentiment. Or maybe he is saying such judgments are unimportant, even if we could distinguish the moral from the immoral. Here is the question of modern liberal “enlightened” western civilization (we being the inheritors of every single value of the eighteenth century “enlightenment” !): is it even possible to decay morally as a culture? And, if so, could such a thing be quantified? And would it matter anyway? American modernity, in every measurable way, says “no” three straight times.