Morality meltdown: The culture war waged by America's liberal elite has taken our society far down the road to perdition. But it is not too late to turn back. (Cover Story: Culture War).

The battle for the soul of America has reached a pivotal point. The tattered shreds of what remains of Christian civilization are under assault as never before, yet who is willing to stand in the breach against the attacking barbarian hordes? Certainly not those who now pose as our political, moral, and spiritual leaders. The ongoing public and shameful lynching of Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is painful enough evidence of that.

For daring to speak against the militant homosexual lobby's perverse agenda and growing power, Senator Santorum has been subjected to a relentless barrage of hate and vitriol. It was to be expected that the most vehement voices of the Lavender Left would go on the attack. Ditto for the usual suspects among the liberal-left media and the Clintonite Democrats. But that combined chorus could not have kept its ridiculous refrain going for more than one news cycle except for the deafening sounds of silence from those who claim to defend morality and family values. The leadership of the Republican Party and many of the so-called social conservative leaders have bailed out at one of the most crucial junctures in the culture war. They have either sinned by silence or aided and abetted the attackers by offering "defenses" of Santorum that are so lame they do more harm than good.

What did the senator say that was so earth-shatteringly provocative? In an April 22nd interview with the Associated Press concerning the U.S. Supreme Court's review of a Texas law against sodomy, the Republican lawmaker noted that "we have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now," and that these laws "were there for a purpose." Senator Santorum went on to remark: "And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does."

That is the offensive statement that launched a thousand screaming headlines and ranting diatribes! To listen to the squeals of outrage from the perversity apologists, one would think that the senator had endorsed the murder of Matthew Shepard or called for rounding up and executing all homosexuals. What is so remarkable about the present flap is that Senator Santorum is being pilloried and flayed for a statement so eminently reasonable and universally accepted only a generation ago.

Even a decade ago, most politicians--even liberal Democrats--would have rushed to agree with Santorum's defense of mom-and-apple-pie morality. Elected officials choosing to side with the sodomites would have been on the defensive. Relatively few would have openly disagreed with the view of homosexuality expressed in Sir William Blackstone's famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). Blackstone, who greatly influenced the American Founding Fathers and who is still reverently quoted in court decisions, described sodomy as the "infamous crime against nature...the very mention of which is a disgrace." It is, said Blackstone, a gross crime condemned "by the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God."

Today this "infamous crime" is being enshrined as a right, and champions of law and morality are in danger of being prosecuted for "hate crimes." How is it possible for such a radical sea change to have taken place virtually overnight?

Battle Plan to Capture the Culture

The answer, of course, is that the revolution we are witnessing is not the recent phenomenon it appears to be. Neither is it the result merely of a natural, historical cycle of moral decay. A "culture war" has been raging all about us for many decades. The forces of organized decadence are waging this war according to the detailed battle plans laid out by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and '30s. The Gramscian strategy called for a long, patient march to capture the cultural "mediating institutions"--the media, schools, universities, churches, civic organizations, publishing, and entertainment--to overturn entrenched religious and cultural values. *

The 1960s sexual revolution was sown in the 1940s and '50s. Alfred C. Kinsey figures prominently in that revolution. With generous funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and boffo promotion from the media elite, Kinsey's 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, became a worldwide sensation and Kinsey became the undisputed authority on human sexuality. However, as Dr. Judith A. Reisman's explosive 1998 expose Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences revealed, Kinsey's research was not only fraudulent, but some of its most provocative theses were based on absolutely abhorrent criminal activity by Kinsey and his fellow sadomasochist "researchers." Specifically, Kinsey and company carried out numerous experiments in sexually torturing infants and young children.

The "scientific" findings of these pathetic sexual psychopaths were then used to attack all legal restraints on sexual license. The Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations provided the funding for the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which was based on Kinsey's reports and greatly influenced by Kinsey's revolutionary ACLU attorney, Morris Ernst. Mr. Ernst claimed that "virtually every page of the Kinsey Report touches on some section of the legal code," and once boasted in an essay for Scientific Monthly that "the Kinsey Report broke through a mass of taboo."

That was no idle boast. The Kinsey report has been cited in hundreds of court cases overturning state and local ordinances. The Model Penal Code (MPC), completed in 1955, has been adopted by many state legislatures--with disastrous results. The MPC legal reforms have eliminated and/or greatly reduced penalties for almost all sex crimes: abortion, rape, statutory rape, seduction, adultery, fornication, prostitution, sodomy, public indecency, and obscenity.

That's Entertainment?!

With the legal bastions crumbling, the barbarians unleashed an all-out assault on every front. The entertainment and news media, along with the radical teachers unions and the leftists in academia, launched a nonstop bombardment deriding traditional mores and glorifying the lewd, crude, rude, and nude. The triumph of each new excess has inspired even more audacious experimentation. Television sitcoms and dramas, along with the big-screen movies, have become toxic wastelands of profanity, pornography, sexual promiscuity, perversion, mindless violence, and nihilism. TV programs from Dallas, Dynasty, Maude, and The Golden Girls, to Hill Street Blues, Baywatch, Ally McBeal, South Park, and Will and Grace have mainstreamed social pathologies into the new "normalcy." Depravity of every sort has been given new status on such acclaimed programs as The Sopranos, Queer as Folk, Sex & the City, The Osbournes, and the Howard Stern Show.

Following the 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School, a public backlash against the entertainment industry's escalating degeneracy forced Hollywood and the recording companies to feign reform and pretend to have developed a social conscience. This fake concern should have fooled nobody. This summer Hollywood is releasing an avalanche of sex and violence. And its media allies are hyping these new offerings with unapologetic praise.

A May 9th Entertainment Weekly article, entitled "R-Restricted: They Shoot R-rated Movies, Don't They?," noted in its subtitle that "Violence, Strong Language, And Some Sexual Content Are Coming Back To A Theater Near You." And, according to the magazine's reporter, Benjamin Svetkey, this is a wonderful thing. "This summer," said Svetkey, "underage moviegoers across the nation will get to do something they haven't done in years: sneak into R-rated action movies." "After years of PG-13-rated fluff filled with bloodless gunplay and an alarming paucity of gratuitous nudity," he continued, "... the big-budget R-rated bone cruncher is ready for a gut splattering comeback."

What planet do Svetkey and his ilk inhabit? "Fluff-filled"? "Bloodless gunplay"? "Alarming paucity of gratuitous nudity"? Yes, according to the self-anointed arbiters of popular culture, the savage fare that has plagued movie theaters over the past several years has been too tame and wholesome. Thus their ecstatic joy over the new crop of hot properties: The Matrix Reloaded, T3: Rise of the Machines, Bad Boys II, and Exorcist: The Beginning.

"People are being as aggressive about R-rated movies as they've been in years," said Revolution Studios partner Rob Moore in the Entertainment Weekly article. "Kids will be getting lots more of the undiluted stuff in the future," Sevetkey approvingly concluded, "at least if the R-rated grosses this summer are as staggering as expected." The same issue of the magazine featured an article entitled "'X-Men' & Gay Men' celebrating Hollywood kudos to and from the homosexual/lesbian community, including "out" homosexual actor Alan Cumming, who played the mutant Night-crawler in the new X-Men United sci-fi action flick.

CNN's April 28th movie review of The Real Cancun is an all too typical example of the major media's shameless promotion of unbridled debauchery. The Real Cancun is a big-screen spin-off of the kind of adolescent drunken revelry dished up weekly on MTV's Real World and other so-called "reality TV" shows -- but with even more explicit sex and raunchiness. "This is the story of 16 strangers picked to go on spring break in Cancun and have their lives taped' says CNN's Meriah Doty. "And their lives," notes Doty, "consist of getting drunk on the beach, making out with random people, waking up hung over the next day, and doing it all over again."

This, says the CNN reviewer, is a show you should "run out to the multiplex and spend money Why? "Because," explains Doty, "it's far more explicit -- and dare I say, real -- than even the raunchiest hot tub romps in the most recent 'Real World' in Las Vegas. And that makes the movie a mindless, guilty pleasure." Thank you CNN!

At about the same time, on April 14th, Reuters news service reported this cheery news: "Daytime television viewers -- considered to be among America's most conservative audiences -- will see their first on-screen lesbian kiss next week." According to the Reuters story:

The kiss will take place during the April 22 episode of the Emmy-award winning soap opera "All My Children," making what ABC said would be a first in the world of daytime television. It comes in a scene featuring gay teen character Bianca Montgomery (Eden Riegel), who came out as a lesbian in 2000, and her new friend Lena (Olga Sosnovska), who "in a moment of truth and true love ... comes to terms with her feelings."

So it goes, day in and day out, an endless parade of depravity. Even the once-venerated Disney label has been corrupted, as informed parents have known for some time. In her keynote address to a 1998 conference of the University of California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Association, lesbian activist Elizabeth Birch told her audience: "[W]hen I said to Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, [that] '30 percent of your employees are gay,' he said, 'You are wrong, Elizabeth, it's 40 [percent].'"

A new book, Queens in the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay & Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks, by homosexuals Jeffrey Epstein and Eddie Shapiro, celebrates Disney's new perversity diversity. The authors, who describe themselves as "queer-as-a-$3-dollar-bill Jewish fags from the Northeast," provide details on cruising the kingdom and secluded sites in the Disney parks where "gays" can hook up, according to reviews of the book.

Audacious Assaults on Morality

The deviant lobby will not let up until they have completely eviscerated virtually all sex crime laws. Indeed, in the Texas case that Sen. Santorum referred to, the amicus brief filed by the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign and more than two dozen other pro-homosexual groups argues for "the right to be free from governmental intrusion into, and criminalization of, private sexual relations between consenting adults." Likewise, Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a supposed conservative who served as President Reagan's solicitor general, asserts: "To criminalize any enjoyment of their sexual powers by a whole category of persons is either an imposition of a very great cruelty or an exercise in hypocrisy inviting arbitrary and abusive applications of the criminal law."

The sex liberationists will not brook any attempt to "criminalize any enjoyment of their sexual powers" - including incest, bestiality, bigamy, and polygamy. They are pushing hard now to legalize pedophilia. Yes, as outrageous as that may sound, that is their aim. Due to their pressure, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychopathologies in 1973, and in 1995 pedophilia was removed. They are trying now to lower or abolish "age of consent" laws that prohibit adult-child sex. They are following the advice of French Revolutionist George Jacques Danton, who counseled, "Audacity, more audacity, always audacity." This is also their battle cry on every other front in the culture war.

The bloody abortion front is a case in point, the recent Senate battle over the partial birth abortion ban being a prime example of unbridled audacity in action. After years of lying to the public about the true extent of the abortion holocaust and claiming that they want the murderous procedure to be kept "rare" and restricted to the earliest stages of pregnancy, their true agenda has been fully exposed. There can be no longer any question that the "prochoice" militants will accept no restriction on their "right" to kill unborn babies right up to full-term delivery, as the helpless infant exits the birth canal.

The fight for "abortion rights" and "homosexual rights" are seamlessly intertwined, with the same radical forces lined up behind both of these anti-family, anti-Christian offensives. In both areas, the revolutionaries are trying not only to upend completely our laws and norms, but even to deny their opponents their right to freedom of expression. The recent experience with "National Pro-Life T-shirt Day" illustrates the present situation. On April 28th, high school students nationwide proudly wore T-shirts to school, expressing opposition to abortion. Despite the clearly established right of students to express their views in this manner, some students were forced to change their shirts. Attorneys for the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm, came to their defense.

The firm's online newsletter reports:

In New Hampshire, a high school freshman was told that her "abortion is homicide" shirt was offensive to some students and faculty and so school officials threatened her with suspension should she not find a more "positive" way of expressing her beliefs. This same school, however, actively promoted just weeks earlier the pro-homosexual "National Day of Silence," where students and teachers expressed their pro-homosexual views by wearing rainbow ribbons during school. School officials apparently did not find this politically correct view "offensive." Shortly after the Thomas More Law Center got involved, school officials agreed that the student had a right to wear her pro-life shirt, even if they didn't like it.

Robert Muise, associate counsel with the Thomas More Law Center handling the New Hampshire case, commented, "The political correctness police are out in full force in the public schools across this nation, seeking to suppress ideas and messages that they oppose."

In virtually every state, the same subversive forces are audaciously attacking once universally revered organizations and institutions such as the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Anny, churches, and Christian charities. Cities and school districts are denying the Boy Scouts access to facilities, and United Way and other funding sources are cutting off contributions because the Scouts refuse to accept "gay" men as leaders. Likewise, the Salvation Army is being kicked off its hallowed pedestal in many communities for refusing to hire active homosexuals and failing to adopt same-sex "domestic partner" benefits for employees.

At the same time, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has proudly announced that the OLSEN-sponsored "Day of Silence" observed on April 9, 2003 "was the most successful and widely supported" in the event's eight-year history. According to GLSEN, "an estimated 200,000 students from 2,000 registered middle and high schools participated this year." For the second year in a row, U.S. Congressman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y) introduced a resolution calling on Congress to recognize the efforts of students in organizing the Day of Silence. Also, for the second year, California Governor Gray Davis officially recognized the Day of Silence with a proclamation. Governors Jennifer Granholm of Michigan and John Rowland of Connecticut also issued proclamations.

The Gramscian strategy, as it pertains to the homosexual revolution, was described with great candor in After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90s, a 1989 manifesto written by homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. "Gays must launch a large-scale campaign," this deviant duo declared, "... to reach straights through the mainstream media." "We're talking about propaganda," wrote Kirk and Madsen. They then described in detail a sophisticated and insidious scheme to use the media to "convert" America by enveloping the culture in pro-homosexual messages. "By conversion we actually mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American way of life," the pervert propagandists boasted. "We mean conversion of the average American's emotions, mind and will, through a planned psychological attack." The plan they methodically spelled out has been implemented to the letter by virtually all of the major media.

Architects of the New World Disorder

In the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer approvingly catalogued the many achievements of the Gramscian social revolution, including: the "visible impact of feminism"; the "emergence of gay rights"; and the "transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements." Mr. Walzer also enthusiastically noted "the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere--classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on." These victories, in what he identified as "the Gramscian war of position," were brought about, not by the revolutionary masses, but by the "liberal elites," he noted.

This same point is made, but with decided disapproval, by the late Christopher Lasch, historian, author, and perceptive social critic. In his book, The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch blasted the same liberal elites "who control the international flow of money and information, preside over the philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate." These elites, he charged, share a "venomous hatred" for "Middle America," which, for them, "has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: 'Family values,' mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism...."

Who are these high-powered elites that, with the Marxist-Leninist left, jointly detest the American middle class, the Christian religion, and family values? We have examined and exposed them often in these pages. They are concentrated most notably on the membership rolls of the Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations. They are the same subversives who funded and promoted Kinsey's devastating revolution and who continue to fund and promote every prong of that continuing attack today. Consider this scathing (and very revealing) attack on truth and Christian sensibility in the current (May/June 2003) issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs:

Architects of an authentic new world order must therefore move beyond castles in the air--beyond imaginary truths that transcend politics--such as, for example, just war theory and the notion of the sovereign equality of states. These and other stale dogmas rest on archaic notions of universal truth, justice, and morality.... Medieval ideas about natural law and natural rights ("nonsense on stilts," Bentham called them) do little more than provide convenient labels for enculturated preferences....

The author of that screed is Michael J. Glennon, professor of international law at the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

"As the world moves into a new, transitional era, the old moralist vocabulary should be cleared away so that decision makers can focus pragmatically on what is really at stake," Glennon claims. The real questions these "decision-makers"--a select group of self-anointed global visionaries composed of the likes of Prof. Glennon, no doubt--must ask are: "What are our objectives?"; and, "What means have we chosen to meet those objectives?"

"Answering those questions," says Glennon, "does not require an overarching legalist metaphysic." "Humanity need not achieve an ultimate consensus on good and evil," he continues. Indeed, "Getting to a consensus," he avers, "will be accelerated by dropping abstractions, [and] moving beyond the polemical rhetoric of 'right' and 'wrong..."

What is important to recognize is that the ongoing destruction of our civilization and all we hold dear has not resulted from blind, historical forces over which we have no control. We are not hopelessly confronting the unavoidable, natural cycle of moral decline. We are under vicious attack by a small, organized cadre of elite revolutionaries who intend our utter obliteration. Yes, they have immense wealth, influence, and power at their disposal. Yes, they have succeeded in spreading their malignant depravity throughout our society and eroding much of our moral fiber. However, there is still sufficient residual strength and virtue in the soul of America to defeat this cabal and reverse our nation's moral descent. To this end, every American worthy of the name should pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.

* See "A Method to the Madness" in the October 23, 2000 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.

RELATED ARTICLE: Traitors Within the Gates

William F. Jasper

The Santorum ordeal is emblematic of the multiple dangers that the forces of decency and godly order face from within and without as we struggle desperately to stop the enemies pushing our society toward the edge of the abyss. Most of the invading barbarians can easily be identified: They audaciously parade their debauchery and brazenly announce their intent to bury our "outdated" morality. They would completely upend the foundations of society--our laws, customs, habits, moral codes, and religious beliefs. They have targeted marriage, the family, manhood, womanhood, childhood, and parenthood for destruction. Their relentless assaults come on many fronts: homosexuality, abortion, pornography, drugs, obscenity, sexual promiscuity, paganism, occultism, and hedonism. The barbarians' open political allies are also easily identifiable; for the most part, they wear the Democrat Party label.

It is not these open enemies, however, who present the greatest threat to our liberty and moral order. As history has amply proven, the greater danger always comes from traitors and false allies from within, who weaken the nation's defenses and undermine the resolve of the defenders with counsels of compromise and conciliation.

The great Roman statesman Cicero warned more than two millennia ago:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor ... rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.

Yes, a murderer is less to be feared, for he can victimize only a relative few. The traitor, on the other hand, would help the enemy seize and victimize the entire nation. Cicero would have no trouble identifying the traitors in Republican and "conservative" garb undermining our legal and moral foundations and opening the city gates to the barbarians under the false banners of "tolerance" and "inclusiveness." Over the past several decades, these subversives gradually have insinuated their camouflaged barbarian co-conspirators into the midst of the true believers and adopted the "big tent" gospel of inclusivity as dogma.

When the pundits in the "tolerance" choir sent up their intolerant hue and cry against Santorum, the GOP leadership made a strategic cave-in. In a screed typical of the liberal-left attack, Eleanor Clift charged in an April 25th MSNB C/Newsweek on-line op-ed that the senator, in a "flight of prejudice," had tripped over the "fine line between stupidity and bigotry." Many Republicans echoed her charges.

Clift also noted: "Bush knows that to break with Santorum would cost him dearly with his conservative base." The president knew that, at least on this point, Clift was right on. So he didn't "break with Santorum' he just let the besieged senator twist in the wind. When a reporter asked White House spokesman Ari Fleischer if the president would comment on the matter, Mr. Fleischer displayed a firm grasp of Clintonian verbal gymnastics. The president "never typically" comments on Supreme Court cases, he asserted. When the reporter responded that Bush had commented considerably on the Michigan affirmative-action case currently before the court, Fleischer replied, "That's why I said--typically." The White House spokesman then offered what was supposed to pass for presidential support for the embattled loyalist senator. President Bush, said Fleiseher, considers Santorum to be "an inclusive man."

The message could not have been clearer: Republicans were being signaled to get in line with the party's "big tent" gospel of "gay" inclusion. "Keeping the tent big is always a work-in-progress," said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who had earlier issued a statement criticizing Santorum's remarks. Calling for diversity in the party, Smith said "Rick [Santorum] represents the continued views of many Republicans, but certainly not a majority of Republicans. He should not be excluded from the Party because of his views." Oh, how tolerant and inclusive! Senator Smith and his diversity disciples charitably deign not to banish unenlightened Republicans who still cling to antiquated notions like those expressed by Santorum. But not for long. Smith seized this opportunity to introduce new "hate crime" legislation he co-sponsored with Democrat Senators Edward Kennedy (Mass.) and Richard Durbin (Ill.), and fellow liberal Republican Arlen Specter (Pa.). According to Sen. Durbin, Senate Republicans could earn "redemption" f or Santorum's supposedly heinous offense by passing this legislation.

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) came up with a similar gem of support for his beleaguered colleague. "Everybody likes Rick Santorum," said Chafee, who also had criticized Santorum's comments. "Reject what he said, but like him as a person." Yes, we'll all just have to put up with these religious Neanderthals--for a while at least. Just don't pay serious attention to their nonsensical beliefs about fixed ideas of right and wrong.

Other Republicans offered similar statements of "support" that were just as pathetic and weak-kneed. All of which could only delight the homosexual lobby. The GOP was essentially saying the same thing as Santorum's more overt attackers, but placing more emphasis on stupidity than bigotry.