Quote of the Day for April Fools’ Day, 2011:
Townhall.com columnist Kathryn Lopez, writing last week on the appalling apparel that dominates the American teen girl’s consumer environment:
Two generations, in other words, are feeling the pain of the feminism that has wreaked havoc on the sexes, leaving us with a boundary-free horizon where teens don’t even have an authority to rebel against.
I grabbed this quote not because I thought the article was all that interesting, but because Lopez nails a tremendously important point here about the repercussions of generations of permissiveness having produced not only that moral paralysis in the face of licentiousness that so characterizes modern “political correctness” ethics, but also ultimately deprives children of any sort of serious moral norms against which to measure their lives.
The great feminist revolt against “patriarchy” has not only far too often turned men into self-serving philistines, and women into shameless tramps, it has corroded expectations for the social function of the family to the point where the very notion that wisdom exists appears quaintly anachronistic – and authority subsequently withers into a dirty word that only manifests itself in violence, which is the ultimate end of all revolt against wisdom.
It’s not that feminism alone bears the blame for the loss of authority in the modern moral consciousness – anti-authoritarianism is the basic impulse of all leftist idealism, after all – but it served as a fulcrum for delegitimizing the basic function of the family as the basic unit of that great web of human compassion which is society, wherein the strong protect the weak in all manner of ways.
At any rate, a very appropriate topic for April Fools’ Day.