Brokeback Morality
by Gary DeMar

Can we ever sing “Home on the Range”1 again without the lyrics being spoiled by images of the latest in homosexual propaganda, Brokeback Mountain, a story about two cowboys in love—with each another? As expected, Hollywood is gushing over the latest finger in the eye of the movie-going public. There have been homosexual-themed movies before (Philadelphia and Boys Don’t Cry). Tom Hanks and Hillary Swank each won an Academy Award for their performances, but neither movie won Best Picture. The buzz around Brokeback Mountain almost assures that it will be in Oscar contention. The folks in Hollywood are desperate for homosexual characters and movies to be featured prominently across the Silver Screen. Why? It’s not that most of Hollywood is made up of homosexuals, although there is a disproportionate number in the entertainment field. Divorce, multiple remarriages, children out of wedlock, drugs, alcohol addiction, sexual exploitation, and just plain bad behavior are common features of the Hollywood in-crowd. If the worst of sexual behavior—homosexuality—can be tolerated and even accepted by the general public, then these other behaviors won’t seem bad any more.

Today’s entertainment and political propagandists have, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defined deviancy down” so that what was morally shocking twenty years ago is acceptable, or at least tolerated, behavior today. Robert Bork, no stranger to moral degradation, having been “Borked” on national television, explains the phenomenon:

Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “afford to recognize.” As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so.”2

At the same time, these same moral misfits are defining their own brand of moral deviancy up. What was considered morally normal thirty years ago—two-parents of the opposite sex married and living together, participation in the Boy Scouts and being protected from homosexual predators, rejecting a pro-death culture, and stay-at-home moms—is now “portrayed as oppressive and shot through with pathologies. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” [Charles] Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.” This situation is thoroughly perverse. Underclass values become increasingly acceptable to the middle class, especially their young, and middle-class values become increasingly contemptible to the cultural elites.”3

Americans have become desensitized to moral degeneracy. Immoral acts that were once only spoken of in hushed tones thirty years ago are now included in the curriculum of our nation’s government schools.

2. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1996), 3.

3. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, 3–4.