The American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders, even though one study showed that 50 percent of the male homosexuals surveyed in one American city had had at least 500 sexual partners and 28 percent had had 1,000 partners. If that is normal behavior then our society has got problems. A representative of today’s mainstream attitude among psycho-therapists recently wrote in a professional journal that most people in his field believe “that human disturbance is largely associated with and springs from absolutistic thinking—from dogmatism, inflexibility, and that [being extremely religious] is essentially emotional disturbance.” In other words, the way to relieve your guilt about an immoral life is to begin believing there is no such thing as an immoral life. Whatever you want to do is moral, if you want to do it.
The same attitudes are springing up everywhere in other fields, including law and the entertainment world. It is apparent that many of those who produce today’s movies, TV programs, and popular music, as well as those who set the editorial policies of many national magazines, believe that homosexuality is harmless, if not healthy. The filmmaker Kieth Merrill said that today’s movie producers have no more hesitation about showing homosexual acts than they do about showing people eating dinner.
Something deep within the collective souls of our society has gone wrong, and it cannot help but influence our attitudes and dull our normal senses in frightening ways. We are almost suffocated by a dense fog of sensuality. Pornography and moral permissiveness are so widespread that there is nothing to compare with it in the last several centuries in any civilized society; not since Rome, not since Sodom and Gomorrah. The enormous scope of the acceptance of homosexuality is what makes it so dangerous. Even when we are surrounded by abnormality or homosexuality, everything somehow seems so normal. As written by Pascal, “When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board ship. When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops, he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.”
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Carson, give the name or names of the person/people who did the study you mentioned in the first paragraph (introduce your sources).
ReplyDeleteTo play "devil's advocate" (even though you know I have a differing opinion) I would say that you have a very strong argument, but it's mostly based on religion or religious beliefs such as morality or the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. The problem that I see with this is that there are many people who aren't religious or do not belief this way in the world today, and for them to really consider your argument I would make a stronger pull towards facts and not personal opinion about what is moral and immoral or what is "moral permissiveness."
ReplyDeleteYour tone was very prominent throughout the paper, and your stance was strong from the very beginning. I'm a little confused by the beginning though, due to the statistic that you used. Who conducted the study? What "American city" was it conducted in? When was the study conducted? facts likes these are necessary to make such a startling statistic credible. Other than that I think your op-ed is very clear and well organized.
You did properly introduce your sources, but I would give a little more background. Is Kieth Merrill a prominent filmmaker/ what movies has he worked on? And some people might not know who Pascal is or what time period he is from. Just a few suggestions. Overall great job!