By Adam Graham

I was overwhelmed by the response to my last article on divorce. I expected perhaps 200 responses to the article when it was posted on Free Republic.com. The responses numbered over a thousand, many of which were conservative divorcees accusing me of thinking they’re horrible people and saying that I believe they should have stayed in relationships in which their lives were in jeopardy. Overall, there was a long blast of, “Stop judging me!”

If people actually read the article, they’d have seen that I acknowledged there were some regrettable instances were divorce is appropriate and I also acknowledged one of the cultural challenges with the church dealing with divorce is that we all know so many decent people who didn’t want the divorce or who were truly wronged by their ex-spouse. This doesn’t change the fact that the rampant divorce does great harm to our culture and we need to find ways to reduce the occurrences of divorce as a civil society and that our churches need to fight to preserve marriages and families.

However, some divorcees don’t see it that way. They tell us divorce is reality and we should get used to it, but our primary duty is to not judge people in difficult occurrences or to act like there’s anything abnormal about a divorce.

I remember back during the Elian Gonzalez affair, someone I knew believed that Elian should be returned to Cuba despite the allegations against his father and the fact that Elian would end up living a life in an Atheistic dictatorship. The reason he supported returning Elian and had no problem with the federal raid to take him back was because he’d had a nasty child custody dispute and his ex had taken his children across state lines.

This in a nutshell is at the root of America’s cultural problem: a narcissistic view of morality and public policy where everything is about us.

If we’ve committed a sin during our life or we’ve done something that’s harmful to the stability of our culture, the last thing we want to do is here somebody opposing the activity or (God forbid) calling it sinful. At the end of the day, that would mean we’d sinned and no one wants to be seen as a sinner or worse a hypocrite by opposing or reforming a practice that they once did.

So, thus many women who had abortions find themselves obliged to support abortion on demand lest they be labeled murderers or hypocrites. Those who were promiscuous in high school can’t tell their own kids that sex before marriage is a bad idea without revealing all the juicy details of their own mis-spent youth. The same goes for drugs.

There’s also many people who will begin to support gay rights once their children come out of the closet, as if the laws of the land our to change merely because their son wants to marry another man, never mind what’s best for society.

This bodes ill for our culture. The difference between modern times and past eras is that people used make mistakes and they would regret them and learn from them. Today, we demand not only acceptance but glorification of our sins. Those who turn from sins are haunted by the possibility of becoming hypocrites by teaching their children not to do what they did. One has to wonder how such parents managed potty training with their fear of hypocrisy.

If we are to survive as a culture, we must come to the amazing conclusion that morality and what’s best for society has nothing to do with our feelings. We must reject the devil’s deal where we get to deceive ourselves about our own conduct at the expense of our national character.

Adam Graham was Montana State Coordinator for the Alan Keyes campaign
in 2000, and in 2004 was a candidate for the Republican nomination for
the Idaho State House. He and his wife live in Garden City, Idaho.
Graham writes about U.S. and Idaho politics on his blog at
http://adamsweb.us/blog. He is currently working on his first Political
Ebook, "The Screwtape Reports".