When Did America’s Downhill Slide Start?
According to the All About Philosophy website, Situational Ethics crashed onto the scene in the early 1960’s, about the time of the hippie movement, Woodstock, and the ”make love, not war” movement. It was the brainchild of the late Joseph Fletcher. The website gives a little background on Fletcher, and may help to explain the moral mess in which we now find ourselves:
His work, Situation Ethics founded the modern situational ethics movement. Fletcher was an Episcopal priest, a member of the Euthanasia Educational Counsel, and an advocate for Planned Parenthood. He was a supporter of both euthanasia and abortion. Quite a piece of work for a so-called priest. It seems apparent he seldom, if ever, read the Bible and the New Testament in particular.
The ultra-liberal Fletcher stated that “decision-making should be based upon the circumstances of a particular situation, and not upon fixed Law. The only absolute is Love. Love should be the motive behind every decision. As long as Love is your intention, the end justifies the means. Justice is not in the letter of the Law, it is in the distribution of Love.” (All About Philosophy website)
The damage Fletcher’s philosophy planted in those impressionable minds of the 1960’s kids who were rebelling against the generation of their parents is enormous. Catch phrase like, “What’s right for you may not be right for me,” quickly began to replace Biblical guidelines. There were no longer any absolutes of “right and wrong,” “black and white.” All that remained were varying shades of gray.
I cannot remember who said it but it has been etched into my memory since shortly after Fletcher’s Situational Ethics cancer took hold in our nation. In giving his example of what happens when a nation abandons the absolutes of right and wrong, he said it is like a gently flowing river which is kept in place by its banks. Remove the banks and the river quickly dries and dies. As a nation, we were like that river, flowing along a rather predictable course. Fletcher’s philosophy was the social bulldozer which flattened the banks. Today we are morally not much more than that dried out riverbed.
Our elected officials offer few real men and women of courage and conviction that we can stand with. I have not heard our President, who is an excellent motivational speaker so long as his teleprompters are working, ever give a unifying speech or pep talk to the nation, geared to pulling us all together as Americans. How refreshing it would be to hear at least some of our elected officials give us something to look up to once more, displaying a “Rah, Rah, right and wrong” spine that you would either love or hate, but at least you would know they had moral conviction instead of the spineless display we now see.
Those at all levels of government greatly influenced by union dollars, are seldom, if ever, looking out for those they are supposed to represent. They are looking for ways to increase their power, period. It has everything to do with, in the case of an elected official, the next campaign, and in the case of the union head, increasing his/her clout so that they can milk more money out of our nation’s municipal, state and federal budgets, most of which goes to the top echelon , not those they “represent.” In the case of politicians, to get reelected, just pass out government freebies to people who pay no taxes and keep them on your government plantation forever, not for America, but for your financial future.
Our government has become little more than a liberal/progressive governmental house of prostitution, with a lot of help from eunuchs – I mean “moderates” from both parties. They will not make an absolute right and wrong statement because they do not want to offend anybody—other than taxpayers, conservatives, Tea Party patriots, Catholics, Protestants, small business owners, gun owners, those who believe in protecting the unborn, those who believe in traditional marriage and legal American citizens. Did I miss anybody?
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