The advanced state of the rot

There is nothing gimmicky about my use of the moniker "post-America" to identify the nation we live in.  Our coins and dollars still say "United States of America," as do our tax forms and the pledge we still sometimes say before gatherings official and otherwise.  

Look for this formality to fray.

Post-America is a place of stinking rot.  Post-America exists to give the middle finger to God.

Dennis Prager has put it plainly:  The decay that has been underway for decades is accelerating.  He enumerates six particular areas basic to the life of a healthy country and shows that they have moved past peril and are now moribund.  There's the death of the family, as evidenced by current rates of illegitimacy and fatherlessness, the decline of education to the point that it is a cesspool of identity politics, the end of male and female, the end of right and wrong, the end of religion, characterized by the absence of absolutes and their replacement with feelings, and the death of beauty.

This last one particularly resonates with me, given my lifelong love of art, particularly music:

There is no good or bad art or literature. You like Beethoven; I like rap. You like Shakespeare; I like Batman. "Street art" (aka graffiti) is worthy of museum exhibition; paint thrown by an "artist" from atop a ladder onto a canvas is considered high art and fetches over $100 million; and a giant sculpture of a dog with lifted leg urinating adorns the front of the Orange County Museum of Art in California.

The rot is so insidious that it has worked its way into conservatism.  We are now told by those who do indeed share our principles regarding economic liberty and foreign policy that we need to rethink God's intentions in creating the universe as he did. Jen Kuznicki has written a piece about a National Journal article by a former Log Cabin Republicans official that demonstrates this line of persuasion:

. . . the last line of the National Journal article shows how the operatives politicize God, which is the real stealth assault on Western Civilization.

“I certainly don't think Steve King is going to wake up one night and say, 'Well I gotta love the gays because I read a poll,' " Berle says. "But I think a lot of people understand what the primary issue is to Americans—concerns about the economy, foreign policy issues—and nobody is really getting kept up at night that the gay couple down street are wearing wedding bands."

Christian Berle is the former deputy executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. His cavalier snark against Representative Steve King (R-IA) shows you just how he and his like-minded operatives expect to talk to the “folks.” Identifying King as someone who hates gays is mean-spirited and ignorant of the issues that real, rational adults think about when it comes to gay marriage. Notice in his turn of phrase, that if you are against gay marriage, you hate gays. Conservatives who are Christian, and rightly have the ability (or at least did in the past) to be able to vote on how they’d like their state to manage issues like this, are all suddenly gay haters. That’s not hyperbolic Christians saying things like this, it is the invective we have been assaulted with these past few years by leftist radical gay activists as well as through our own state republican parties. Not only is the gay advocacy condoning tearing down state constitutional amendments, they view people who cling to their religion as idiots and zealots, much like Barack Obama did during his original presidential campaign.

And the tortured what-if scenarios regarding the assertion of religions freedom get more outrageous by the day.  Dr. Susan Berry at Breitbart  shows the degree to which the ACLU has refined this to exquisitely levels of grotesqueness:

As reported at Nola.com, ACLU attorney Marjorie Esman said regarding husbands, “He could say ‘It is my moral conviction that my spouse can submit to discipline from me.’ … It basically dismantles the Louisiana legal system. The whole criminal code goes out the window.”

Leftwing opponents of religious freedom legislation are continuing a trail of fear mongering that led Indiana lawmakers and Gov. Mike Pence (R) to cave to demands to change that state’s law last week.

Michael Reed, Communications Director for Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) said in a statement sent to Breitbart News that Esman’s comment is “an example of the absurdity of the Left and the length they will go to spread lies about laws to protect individual religious rights from adverse action by government.”

“This comment is shockingly reprehensible – but fortunately quite absurd and misinformed,” Reed added.

House Bill 707, introduced by Louisiana state Rep. Mike Johnson (R), would create the “Marriage and Conscience Act,” and “create a cause of action for the protection of the right of conscience as relates to marriage.”

“House Bill 707 doesn’t change any law to allow people or businesses to do anything that is currently against the law, be it spousal abuse, or breaking and entering, or jaywalking,” continued Reed. “The bill that has been filed simply ensures the state cannot deny a license, certification, accreditation, contract, etc. to an individual or business on the basis of a sincerely held religious belief about marriage.”

In a written statement to Nola.com, Johnson said the ACLU and those supporting the militant LGBT agenda “are intentionally engaging in a campaign of fear, intimidation and misinformation about this bill.”

Do we have any weapons of such effectiveness?

While Peter Wehner more often than not demonstrates a tendency toward Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, and indeed does so toward the end of this piece at Commentary on Hillary and culture war, he makes some chilling points we ought to ponder:

The distortions, mob mentality, and smear campaign that characterized the reaction of the left to the Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the federal version of which Bill Clinton signed into law) will be amplified by a factor of a hundred. If Hillary Clinton could talk about contraception, abortion, evolution, same sex marriage, and equal pay for equal work every day between now and November 2016, she would.

The 2010s is not the 1970s or 1980s, when focusing on cultural issues and symbols helped the GOP. As National Journal’s Ron Brownstein has written

While Republicans took the offense on most cultural arguments through the late 20th century, now Democrats from Obama on down are mostly pressing these issues, confident that they represent an expanding majority of public opinion.

Veteran pollster Stanley B. Greenberg captures this almost unprecedented Democratic assurance when he declares flatly: “Republicans are on the losing side of all of these trends.”

Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard illustrates the advanced degree of our rot with the story of a certain teenaged heart-transplant recipient:

 You probably don't remember Anthony Stokes, but back in 2013, he was briefly famous. Stokes was a 15-year-old Georgia kid with a bad heart: Born with an enlarged heart, doctors gave him roughly six months to live if he didn't get a transplant. The problem for Stokes-besides his terrible medical condition-was that the medical authorities wouldn't put him on the transplant list because they deemed him to be a high risk for non-compliance. You see, Stokes had not just a history of bad grades but a criminal record, too. "We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind," a flack from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta said at the time. "They said they don't have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups," said Stokes' mother. 

But this is America, so you can already guess how this story went. Stokes' family went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They cried racism. Then social media and "#BlackTwitter" (their term, not mine) kicked in. And the doctors at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta freaked out because there are few things as unsettling as being called a racist by hordes of people on the internet. So the doctors reversed course and put Stokes on the transplant list. And, by the grace of God, Stokes got a heart. (Which means that someone else, by necessity, did not.)
And then the left-from the Huffington Post to Think Progress to Gawker to Ebony-did a victory lap. To their mind, they had won another victory in the culture war, exposing racism, shaming the power structure, and making the world a more perfect place.
Last Tuesday, a little less than two years after Stokes was gifted a heart, he-allegedy-broke into an 81-year-old woman's home and, upon being discovered, fired gunshots at her. He-allegedly-fled the scene in a car that police later determined had been stolen. Police pursued Stokes in a high-speed chase. After a few miles Stokes-allegedly!-hit a pedestrian, whereupon he crashed the stolen car and died. (We don't have to cover ourselves on this last bit; he is indisputably dead.)
There's a great parable wrapped up in this story. And yet in the public consciousness, the death of Anthony Stokes barely registers. He's not even a footnote. But he should be. Because he got a heart that could have gone to someone else if not for the online mob and charges of racism. He got a heart-and someone else did not-because of the culture war. And he wasted it.

And I think it's appropriate to give the final word on this entire subject to Last as well:

Whatever happens in Iran, the culture war in America has gone nuclear. And I suspect that there's no going back.

And that, folks, is where we are.