Freedom of Screech

I get along pretty well with most of the gay people I know. We speak about everything outside of our personal lives and it works.

Then there are the immature ones. They have to announce where they were last night. They are too juvenile to censor themselves. They make a lot of people very uncomfortable.

I wish I could scream down the fools, but I cannot confront them. Not without losing my job or being written up as a racist. But I cannot tolerate such speech. It’s truly obscene. How did we get to a point where it’s acceptable to discuss the worst abominations in the Torah, yet it is wrong to act to silence the discussion?

There is a powerful lesson to be learned here.

About a half a century ago, it became acceptable to talk about all forms of physical relations between a man and a woman. Once we did, we broke a line. Some of what is forbidden by G-d suddenly became acceptable to man. In ushering an era of selective permissiveness, we devolved to the point where everything is permissible.

Now we value it. To say that some people are forbidden to express what they want is racist, not righteous. How do you combat an evil without being pushed into being called evil yourself?

We admit the unthinkable: The gay voice has a point. Either everything is permissible or everything is unacceptable. This was what we faced in the Spring of 1960 when the FDA approved the birth control pill and it ushered in an era of “acceptable promiscuity.” Back then, the voices that objected warned that any form of promiscuity does not belong in civilization. Once it started, there was no end to how far our world could fall.

The graphic nature of gay speech is the extreme end of any type of personally unholy speech. The fact that it stings a lot more than listening to “straight” talk of this nature is a potent warning to our senses that something must be done.

We are the standard bearers of right and wrong. We represent not human values which change with the wind, but G-d’s values which are eternal, absolute, and unchanging.

It is up to us to demand a world where the basic standard of conversation is always rated G – suitable for all audiences. If we do not, then we are also liable for a world in which watercooler talk includes what happened at last week’s pride parade.

It is unnecessary to single out the gay community for expressing themselves: Anybody who dares talk openly about subjects that belong strictly within the sanctity of marriage should be made subject to criticism and rebuke. There is no need for discrimination – a member of any ethnicity, personal orientation, religion, or race should be reminded of the human responsibilities to upholding a civilized world.

We must always remember that every sentence we utter, which breaches these standards of adult conversation, is the reason we got to this point. Every word we recite that upholds the best of human values reverses this trend and sets us back on the right course. Democracy permits freedom of speech but not freedom of screech, contaminating our spiritual atmosphere with lewd talk.

Are you a prude if you want a healthy world to raise your children in? If so, then being a prude is worth fighting for.