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Registered: 11-2008
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American's don't agree about what's moral


I wonder if the reason Americans can't agree about sexual equality is that they would first have to agree about honesty.

Is Trump ‘morally unfit’ to be president? Not if Americans can’t agree on what’s good and bad.

by R. Marie Griffith
April 20

Donald Trump is “morally unfit” to be president, James B. Comey, the FBI director Trump fired last year, declared in the ABC interview this week that kicked off the publicity tour for his book, “A Higher Loyalty.”

But to judge moral fitness, shouldn’t we first agree on what moral behavior is? We’re talking about basic right and wrong, what we consider to be good and bad. And we differ widely on the answer.

This is certainly true when it comes to matters of sex. Divergent evaluations of behavior have driven our culture wars for decades, and sex has often been at the center of them. It was not always so. At the end of the 19th century, Americans did hold a shared morality where sex and marriage were concerned. Americans believed in, and took for granted as natural, a sexual order in which men were heads of households, wives needed to submit to husbands’ authority, and monogamous heterosexual marriage was the only moral place for sexual relations. This was believed to be God’s law, or nature’s, and those who broke the rules were often punished or shunned.

That consensus began to fracture after 1920, when women achieved the vote and something closer to equal citizenship rights with men, and the rupture deepened in subsequent years as birth control became increasingly accessible and accepted. More questions cropped up: Must women limit their lives to marriage and motherhood? Could they be trusted to take charge of their own bodies? Should the government police private sexual behavior? Moral issues became subject to fierce debate in conflicts over obscenity laws, interracial marriage, sex education, abortion, sexual harassment and LGBTQ rights. And the ferocity of emotions regularly led activists fighting changes in the moral code to tactics of outright deception, evasion and political machinations in service to supposedly moral ideals.

Americans have a core disagreement about women’s equality with men, and the significance of sexual behavior, that has deepened over the past century. On one side, it emphasizes sexual purity, clear distinctions between “men” and “women,” and authoritative male headship — the patriarchy. On the other side, morality is centered on social justice, gender and racial parity, and civil rights for all.

Honesty is another moral concern. Well before Comey pronounced Trump morally unfit, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was fending off Trump’s accusation that Cruz’s father was somehow tied to the assassination of Kennedy. Trump is “utterly immoral,” Cruz said. “Morality does not exist for him.” If definitions of morality are mutable when it comes to sex, they may be even more so when it comes to dishonesty and violence. Many presidents have cheated on their wives and otherwise exploited women sexually, but still more have lied shamelessly to the press and the public, upheld policies deeply damaging to African Americans and other citizens, and caused the deaths of millions worldwide.

https://tinyurl.com/ycbwrdlf


4/22/2018, 4:17 pm Link to this post PM Bellelettres
 
Philer Profile
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Registered: 12-2016
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Re: American's don't agree about what's moral


True and whether we consider a politician to be of good moral character appears to have more to do with what side of the political spectrum he falls and whether we like him than his actual state of morality.

He can be a pretty immoral character but if we like him from a political standpoint or just like him as a person we can appear to have blinders on when it comes to his morality.
4/25/2018, 8:16 am Link to this post PM Philer Blog
 


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