You -- yes, you -- can be morally superior to Dennis Prager merely by gazing at him and thinking he's kind of a dick. I mean.
As one who loves America -- not only because I am American, but even more so because I know (not believe, know) that the American experiment in forming a decent society has been the most successful in history -- I write the following words in sadness: With few exceptions, every aspect of American life is in decline.
Is one of those exceptions that we're not as horribly racist as we've been for most of our history, at least overtly?
Ha ha a joke. By "decline" Prager seems to mean that "America" is becoming ever less "decent." The American "experiment" is to do with dispositively establishing the claim that, in regards to other nations, Fuck You, we are the decentest.
By what metric?
The Decline of the Family: Nearly half (48 percent) of American children are born to a mother who is not married. Forty-three percent of American children live without a father in the home. About 50 percent of Americans over 18 are married, compared to 72 percent in 1960. Americans are having so few children that the fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women in 2013. And in an increasing number of states, there are now more deaths than births.
Gosh.
For openers, all citations are omitted, because this is Townhall. I am willing to bet that these statistics are all trash, but I can't be arsed to look them up any more than Prager could be arsed to cite them.
But it's fun to note that Prager seems to be bitching that "America is having too few babies, and the only babies we have are popping out of sluts!"
That's fun!
The Decline of Education: Compared to nearly all of American history, the average American school teaches much less about important subjects such as American history, English grammar, literature, music and art. Instead, schools are teaching much more about "social justice," environmentalism and sex.
Evidence omitted.
I have not yet encountered the liberal-minded individual who has advocated cutting funding for literature, music, and art in our public schools. But it's still YOUR fault, hippie fuckface.
As for "environmentalism," presumably Prager means that kids should not learn about how physics works so that Our Kids are not brainwashed by Science into believing bullshit about what happens when shitloads of carbon are pumped into the atmosphere.
Any of us who receive emails from large numbers of Americans can attest to the deteriorating education -- including among those who attended college -- in written English. In sophisticated commentary on websites as well as in email, one encounters the most basic errors: "it's" instead of "its;" "their" instead of "there;" "then" instead of "than," etc.
You write for Townhall, asshole, which has comments sections. And many, many dumb columnists. And is edited by nobody smarter than a bowling ball. Wanna play?
This is also of course not a sign of "deterioration" even remotely, of course, as regards grammar skills. There is an extensive literature -- oh, fuck it, what do I know, besides my fucking doctorate that Mao himself gave me.
Most universities have become secular seminaries for the dissemination of Leftism. Moreover, aside from indoctrination, students usually learn little. One can earn a BA in English at UCLA, for example, without having read a single Shakespeare play.
Oh fuck you Zombie Shakespeare.
To the extent that American history is taught, beginning in high school and often earlier, American history is presented as the history of an immoral nation characterized by slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism, economic exploitation, and militarism -- not of a country that, more than any other, has been the beacon of freedom to mankind, and the country that has spent more treasure and spilled more blood to liberate other peoples than any other nation.
Citations omitted.
I'm actually coming up blank on a single example of the US "liberating other peoples" that is not highly qualified by someone, you know, explaining what actually happened, and why.
Beyond that, please don't teach my kids propaganda? Shouldn't that be beneath us? Prager? Prager?
The End of Male and Female: Whatever one's position on same-sex marriage, one must acknowledge that at the core of the argument for this redefinition of marriage is that gender doesn't matter. Marriage is marriage, and gender means nothing, the argument goes. So, too, whether children are raised by mother and father or two mothers or two fathers doesn't matter. A father has nothing unique to offer a child that a mother can't provide and vice versa.
This is hilarious considering the previous grammar snobbery: Gender! Prager is too dumb to know what pointless fights he's already lost.
Anyway there is no evidence of any sort to back up Prager's nonsense, though there are a lot of lies.
Blah blah blah transgenders are bad... OK:
The End of Right and Wrong: At least two generations of American young people have been taught that moral categories are nothing more than personal (or societal) preferences. Recently, an incredulous professor of philosophy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled "Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts." In it he noted, "Without fail, every value claim is labeled an opinion" (italics in original). This extends to assessing the most glaring of evils. Since the Nazis thought killing Jews was right, there is no way to know for sure whether it was wrong; it's the Nazis' opinion against that of the Jews and anyone else who objects. I have heard this sentiment from American high school students -- including many Jewish ones -- for 30 years.
Good.
Human beings committed the Holocaust. Human beings sat in judgement of those who ran the camps.
There was, you know, no supernatural entity taking part in the Nuremberg trials. That was all run by humans.
"Moral categories" ARE "nothing more than personal (or societal) preferences." This is precisely why us nasty progressives are so passionate about moral issues. It's because history shows that anyone who conceives of morality as some sort of abstract system of absolute rules has turned out to be, in practice, a vicious asshole. Like, say, someone who says "gays shouldn't marry" and then whines when he's told to fuck off as a bigot.
The End of Religion: There are no moral truths because there is no longer a religious basis for morality. More than the Enlightenment, it was the Bible -- especially the Hebrew Bible (which was one reason America's Christians were different from most European Christians) that guided the Founders' and other Americans' values. Not anymore. Instead of being guided by a code higher than themselves, Americans are taught to rely on their feelings to determine how to behave. Instead of being given moral guidance, children are asked, "How do you feel about it?"
I don't get how "obey the imaginary person" makes one automatically more "moral" than "I've thought hard about this and I've decided to treat my fellows as I would like to be treated."
And why shouldn't children be asked "how do you feel about it"? This is a snorter.
The End of Beauty: Just as morality is subjective; so are beauty and excellence. 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.
Given how much fun Shakespeare had with dirty shit, this is hilarious.
Prager is complaining that he doesn't get to make the rules anymore.
More than that, he's writing a boring and lazy appeal to old white bigots so that they send him money.
