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SKIPPING TOWARDS GOMORRAH PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Dan Savage | 320 pages | 01 Oct 2003 | Penguin Books | 9780452284166 | English | New York, NY, United States SKIPPING TOWARDS GOMORRAH | Bork , a former United States Court of Appeals judge. Bork's thesis in the book is that U. Specifically, he attacks modern liberalism for what he describes as its dual emphases on radical egalitarianism and radical individualism. The title of the book is a play on the last couplet of W. Bork first traces the rapid expansion of modern liberalism that occurred during the s, arguing that this legacy of radicalism demonstrates that the precepts of modern liberalism are antithetical to the rest of the U. He then attacks a variety of social, cultural, and political experiences as evidence of U. Among these are affirmative action , increased violence in and sexualization of mass media , the legalization of abortion , pressure to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia , feminism and the decline of religion. Bork, himself a rejected nominee of President Ronald Reagan to the United States Supreme Court , also criticizes that institution and argues that the judiciary and liberal judicial activism are catalysts for U. Except, of course, for the first lines of our nation's first document. That "pursuit of happiness" stuff? That's just poetry. Americans shouldn't be free "to choose which virtues to practice or not practice," Bork argues, as that would entail, "the privatization of morality, or, if you will, the 'pursuit of happiness,' as each of us defines happiness. The pursuit of happiness is so rank and unpleasant a concept for Bork that he sticks it between quotes as if he were holding it with a pair of tongs. Bork isn't the only social conservative who wants to rewrite our nation's founding document. Buchanan simply deletes the pursuit of happiness from the Declaration of Independence: "Jefferson meant that we are all endowed by our creator with the same right to life, liberty, and property," Buchanan writes. If our founding fathers were as thoughtful and wise as original intenters and social conservatives are always telling us, we can only assume that our founding fathers selected "pursuit of happiness" over "property" for a good reason. Out of respect for our founding fathers' original intent, shouldn't we assume that they knew what they were doing? Shouldn't we assume that they meant it? Apparently not. Pleasure is material; happiness is spiritual. Pleasure is self-involved; happiness is outer- and other-involved. Laura, but all Americans should be free to define happiness for themselves, and some of us find happiness in pursuits that Dr. Laura wants to see banned. But Dr. Laura is hardly the most extreme of the virtuecrats. Keyes is an African American conservative who ran for president in and , and is the host of a talk show launched on MSNBC in early Gosh darn that liberal media elite! Keyes is obsessed with abortion and homosexuality, and he believes America wouldn't be in such "a dismal state" if only Americans would recognize that the Christian Bible trumps the United States Constitution in matters of law and public policy. Why is that? It's a willfully perverse reading of the Declaration of Independence. By invoking the Creator, Keyes argues, the authors of the Declaration of Independence meant to negate every other word they wrote. Our founding fathers had ample chance to distance themselves from or completely disavow the pursuit of happiness when they gathered in Philadelphia in to draft the United States Constitution. They didn't seem to slouch into Philadelphia heavy with regret about the happiness line in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, they seemed pretty pleased with themselves, gathering in Philadelphia, as they wrote, "in order to form a more perfect union. I'm no Constitutional scholar, I admit, nor have I had the honor of being nominated to the Supreme Court; I didn't serve my country as the first in a long line of wildly ineffective drug czars; and I've also never hosted a do-as-I-say call-in radio advice program that obsessed about sexual morality while at the same time nude pictures of me taken by a premarital sex partner were circulated on the Web. And I haven't, like Bennett, "served two presidents. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" were such a big, fat, fucking mistake, then our wise founding fathers would have realized it in the eleven years that passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the first meeting of the Constitutional Congress. If they felt "the pursuit of Happiness" was a mistake, they surely would have done something to correct it when they gathered to make our union just a little more perfect. Our founding fathers failed, of course. It was their "original intent" to allow slavery to flourish and to deny women the right to vote. Talk about your imperfect unions. Joycelyn Elders, RIP. I, for one, am sick of being told that I live in an immoral wasteland. Robert Bork is a best-selling author, former federal judge, and failed Supreme Court nominee who looks at the United States and sees Gomorrah, the biblical city-state destroyed by God along with Sodom, a neighboring bedroom community. William J. Bennett is the Jesse Jackson of the right, the omnipresent former education secretary and federal drug "czar," who, like Jackson on the left, is the ass his party feels obliged to kiss. Bennett was somewhat less prominent when Newt Gingrich divorced his second wife and married a congressional aide. Pat Buchanan is the conservative television pundit, Hitler-admiring two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and the Reform Party's candidate in Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah was published in , and in it Bork made the case for censorship of rap albums, video games, and violent films , the rollback of reproductive rights, and the enforcement of sodomy laws, among other things. It's a thrilling read, and it set a new standard for conservative commentary. In books, magazines, speeches, and on television, Bork and other right- wing "scolds," as Andrew Sullivan has dubbed them, argue that the United States of America is in a state of moral collapse--Bennett says as much in the title of his latest book, The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family. The United States is "a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland that is not worth living in and not worth fighting for," according to Buchanan. Buchanan seems anxious to be president of this moral sewer, however. The threats, however, come not from without but from within. Abortion, drugs, and single moms. The moral-rotters, according to conservatives, are aided and abetted at every step by the liberal media elite. The same media elite that can't turn over a rock without offering a book deal and a show on Fox News to whatever is crawling underneath. As we learned on September 11, , our moral rot can have deadly consequences with supernatural causes. According to Rev. Jerry Falwell, it was the presence of feminists, ACLU members, homos, and federal judges that prompted God to "lift the curtain" of protection from the United States, "and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve [on September 11]. Writing in The New Republic after the attacks, Andrew Sullivan pointed out that the reaction of the American people to the attacks on our country by Islamo-fascists proved that the scolds--the Borks, Buchanans, Bennetts, Falwells, Robertsons, et alia--had been wrong about America all along: Not long ago, leading paleoconservatives were denouncing America as a country, in Robert Bork's words, "slouching towards Gomorrah. None of this was ever true. The response of the American people to the events of September 11 surely disproved these scolds once and for all. Shortly after Sullivan wrote those words, Pat Buchanan's Death of the West-- " [the United States is] a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland that is not worth living in and not worth fighting for. Curiously, after spending three hundred pages making the United States sound like Calcutta, Buchanan wraps up his book with a one-sentence paragraph about what a beautiful country this is. Speakers at the Republican National Convention do the same thing: Once they've finished telling us that the United States is a shithole, they wrap up their speeches with claims that the United States of America is unique in the world, a shining example to other nations, and the greatest country on earth. Oh, and God bless America. It's difficult to square this circle: America speeds towards hell in a handbasket, year in, year out, through both Democratic and Republican administrations; things get progressively worse, never better; and yet the United States remains the greatest country on earth, year in, year out. How is this possible? How can we be the stinking moral sewer and the shining city on the hill at the same time? Gomorrah and God's country? Are all the other countries on earth so irredeemably awful, so squalid, so beyond hope that no matter how fast America falls we can't pass a single one on the way down? This explanation might cut it if the rest of the world were Syria, Sudan, and Serbia. But how do the Buchanans, Bennetts, and O'Reillys account for perfectly pleasant little countries like Sweden? Or the Netherlands? Or Canada? By the way, someone needs to alert Pat Buchanan that Canada is not in Europe. Between and , out-of-wedlock births soared in Canada from 4 percent to 31 percent, in the U.
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