How is social morality viewed in our country?

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

DR. RICHARD LAND: Ben, welcome to For Faith and Family.

BEN SHAPIRO: Thanks so much for having me.

LAND: Ben, why in particular did you target the porn generation for criticism?

SHAPIRO: I targeted the porn generation because obviously, in about ten years, we are going to be the ones running the show, and if you have a generation of people who truly believe that the “live and let live” standard should govern, then that is the destruction of culture in society as we know it. It is the destruction of traditional moral values. Now when I say, “live and let live culture,” what I am really talking about is this idea out there that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt me. You can do what you want in the privacy of your own home, you can do what you want even in the public square, as long as it doesn’t impose your values on me. Well, the problem with that is that as soon as you ask for societal tolerance and acceptance and approval for your behavior, you are imposing your values on me. I mean, for instance, the pornography issue, when people say, look I have a right to view pornography in my own home, you have no business what I do. Essentially, what they are doing is asking us for our acceptance and tolerance and approval of their behavior in private. When they do that, they are enforcing their standards of behavior. The problem is that the idea of societal morality, the idea of Judo-Christian morality has been entirely driven from the public square. Instead, we are told that basically we just have to sit back and let everything enter the public square. We have been told that pollution of the river of culture is a necessary by-product to liberty, which it is not and has not been for 200 years. But, that generation, the porn generation, generation of people my age who have grown up in a generation that has espoused those values, really comes to believe that social morality has no place in our country.

LAND: Ben, I think it is important to note that the only view that cannot be tolerated in a totally relativistic society is a view that believes that there are absolutes.

SHAPIRO: Absolutely, because the whole god of tolerance is directly opposed to the god of religion, the Judeo-Christian God. Because the god of religion says that there are things that we cannot tolerate, things like sin, things like evil, things like wrong, but in a completely tolerance society, which has been held us as the standard, has been held up as the hallmark of a good society. Essentially what we are told is that it is all about the individual; it is not about any sort of standards of right and wrong, that everybody’s morals are equal and good. When that happens, I think that you begin to see more and more tolerance of evil, more and more tolerance of deviance, and that is exactly what has happened in the culture. So, you have seen the growth and the spread of things like pornography, which is an evil, which is a sin, which is a wrong. You have seen the growth of homosexuality, you’ve seen the growth of premarital sex and promiscuity, you’ve seen the growth of abortion. All of that has been fostered by this attitude that all moral standards are equal; all moral standards are not equal, and I think the people of this country, by and large, understand that, and I think that is the real problem here. People understand what I’m saying—at least people who are not of the porn generation. But people of the porn generation don’t understand what I’m saying and they don’t believe what I’m saying. People who do believe what I’m saying have been driven from the public square because they have been told over and over by people on the social left that is all about rights. Really, when we get down to it, there is a right to engage in pornography, there is a right to engage in obscenity, there is a right to pornography, there is a right to abortion, there is a right to privacy, this blanket right to privacy established by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut back in 1965. So what has happened is the power has been taken out of the hands of the people, because we are not even allowed to vote on these issues anymore, we are not allowed to have communal standards, and if we ask for communal standards, there is something wrong with us—we are intolerant, we are bigoted. You know, when you start calling Judeo-Christian standards of morality intolerance and bigoted, you are going to end up with a society just like France where religion is cast out of the public sphere—where you are seen as someone terrible and horrible for being religious or for having such a thing as standards.

LAND: Absolutely, and you know, what it really boils down to is the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions.

SHAPIRO: Exactly. I think that is what has happened here is the social left has essentially stated that they are, indeed, suggestions and, at that, they are bad suggestions that we shouldn’t even take them. But I think, again, this goes back to the castigation of authority figures, going all the way back to the 1950s and 1960s. What happened there was the overthrow of traditional morality in favor of this new relativism. There are a number of factors that went into that movement. I think one of the factors was radical feminism, which pointed out one thing that was true, which is that men and women were being held to different moral standards. They said, look, men are being held to a lower moral standard than women, and that is not fair. Well, that was right, you know, men were being held to a lower moral standard, but instead of saying, men it’s time to shape up, it is time to act like gentlemen, the radical feminist movement said, “Okay, well clearly the standards themselves are wrong, so what we are going to do is we are just going to throw out all standards and women can act like men and instead everyone’s view of what is personally moral will go in the public sphere.” That was one factor contributing to this. The other factor was this right to talk that has absolutely taken over our culture. The social left is so good with rhetoric and what they do is they just say, “Look you have a right to engage in certain behavior.” Now, most people on the right, even people who are socially conservative, believe strongly in rights. You know, we like rights; we are not real big fans of the government in general. We prefer local control, so when someone says we are right, our ears kind of perk up and we think, you know, that’s not such a bad idea. Maybe there is a right to engage in pornography or obscenity; I mean, after all, it is a right isn’t it? Well, the problem is that all of those rights, these personal rights that have been espoused by the social left, encroach on communal rights. Communal rights should be free of this sort of thing, or at least communal rights to vote to be free of this sort of thing, and that is seen nowhere more than on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has forwarded this agenda of a new narcissistic, annalistic, kind of existential, very personal morality-based society. The Supreme Court says, I mean, I think it was Sandra Day O’Conner actually, who said it best in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, that there is a right in this country to define morality for yourself, to define your vision of the universe. Well, there really isn’t. I mean, there is a communal right to define morality, and when you take that away from the community, then you end up with a group of individuals, not a community, and that undermines fundamental American values, and we need to be unified as a nation in order to pursue the good, in order to pursue God’s truth, in order to pursue justice and right in the world.