Rejecting the "Latest Thing"
Wish I'd said that!
[Reprinted from Issues & Views August 13, 2001]
The liberal litany of abuse is based on the assumption that we all have a duty to keep abreast of the latest moral fads, a duty to repudiate our own traditions. The old is bad, the new is good. If you still believe the things Western man has always believed--for instance, that sodomy is an ugly vice--you are now a "bigot."
Such invective has all the weighty authority of a teenage clique calling you a "square." It means only that you’ve committed the mortal sin of failing to keep up with a self-defined smart crowd. The ever-shifting orthodoxy of the new, as against the permanence of the old, is inculcated and enforced by the mass media, an organized system of peer pressure.
For this reason I instinctively sympathize with people who refuse to be bullied into conformity with the Latest Thing. I admire the reactionary Catholic, the Orthodox Jew, the fundamentalist Protestant, the Mormon, the diehard Confederate--anyone who has the guts to prefer a tradition to a compulsory modern fashion. I may disagree with him, but at least I know he’s not made of jelly. His inner life resists external pressure.
-- From "Hate Mail," by Joseph Sobran, syndicated columnist; he is editor of Sobran's, a monthly newsletter.
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