Southern Values Threaten Elites

by Robert Stacy McCain

How wide is the culture gap between Southerners and the imperial elite who rule us by right of conquest? A glimpse of this yawning chasm was seen in a March issue of the Washington Post. Profiling the Texas-bom Whitewater prosecutor in an article, "The Roots of Ken Starr's Morality Plays," writer Sue Anne Pressley finds it necessary to explain:

His parents, plain-spoken people with clear-cut values, watched over him with a loving but unyielding eye, and drummed into him their view of how good people should behave .... Religion was central to the family's life. Members of the Church of Christ believe in the saving grace of baptism and are steeped in the New Testament teachings of Jesus. Starr attended Sunday school each week and learned all the old Bible stories - Joseph and his coat of many colours, Noah and the ark, the Sermon on the Mount.

Now, this description roughly characterizes the upbringing of virtually every member of my family, every kid I went to school with, and the vast majority of native Southerners. Yet such a background is so alien to our Beltway Babylonians that Ms. Pressley felt obliged to explain it in some detail, rather than merely saying that Mr. Starr's parents raised him with "old-fashioned Christian values," something any Southerner would have understood instantly.

There is something else in Pressley's description of Mr. Stares background that is striking: a tone of menace, as if such curiously provincial attitudes as "clear-cut values" and a belief in "saving grace" are somehow a threat to an America where the Founding Fathers created the First Amendment to protect the citizen's right to moral relativism and agnosticism.

This, you see, is how "freedom of religion" is understood by our enlightened overlords -- not as a safeguard against government coercion in spiritual affairs, but as a guarantee that no one will ever encounter an expression of Christian faith or morals outside the confines of a church. The eradication of obsolete and dangerous superstitions such as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount (not to mention the first chapter of Romans) is entrusted to public schools and the ACLU. Question this agenda for the utter secularization of American culture, and you will find yourself denounced as a bigot and a pawn of the "Religious Right" by such self-anointed defenders of liberty as People for the American Way. Talk about intolerance and self-righteousness --by their very name, this group of left-wingers implies that their opponents are AGAINST the " American Way!"

Notice something else about Ms. Pressley's description of Mr. Stares early life: His parents "watched over him ... and drummed into him their view of how good people should behave." Did you notice the hint of authoritarianism there? "Drummed into him!" Why, his folks were practically fascists! And there is, according to Ms. Pressley, no generally recognized "view of how good people should behave" among Americans -- no widespread consensus on the importance of such things as manners, kindness, honesty, hard work. Instead, the code of conduct imposed upon young Kenneth by Mr. and Mrs. Starr was simply "their view," a narrow-minded and no doubt repressive strait-jacket of taboos and dictates.

Like other Beltway intelligentsia, Pressley does not seem to believe that parents can be entrusted to raise their own children, since they might do as Mr. Starr's parents and teach harmful notions like "thou shall not commit adultery." Better to entrust children to the wise folks who run Head Start and the public schools, who teach multiculturalism, Darwinism and the proper use of condoms. If not, your children might grow up to be literate, religious or chaste. And such people are, like Starr, a threat to the existing order, in which hordes of ignorant subjects vote however they are told to vote in return for welfare handouts for their illegitimate spawn.

While virtue, intelligence and courage are valued attributes in the citizens of a republic, an empire requires subjects who are corrupt, ignorant and dependent. Such are the qualities which the political, financial and political elites of the American empire seek to instill in the children of their conquered subjects. The moral and intellectual decline of American youth is not, as some would suggest, an accidental by-product of the Welfare State regime. Rather, it is an essential part of our imperial elite's plan to destroy all resistance to their despotic rule.

The culture gap between Washington and Dixie is growing narrower, not because some self-proclaimed "conservatives" have captured Congress, but because public education, popular culture and the news media have steadily eroded the sort of "clear-cut values" which once defined Southern society. If Southern parents do not practice cultural secession-by withdrawing their children from public schools and protecting them from other soul-poisoning influencesthere will soon be nothing left for true conservatives to conserve. If current trends continue, your children's children will be taught to celebrate the virtues of Hillary Clinton, Ellen DeGeneres and Jack Kervorkian.

As for our own children, my wife and I are busy teaching them about Jesus and Moses and Joseph. Just like Mr. and Mrs. Starr, we are drumming into our children our own view of how good people should behave. Perhaps, like Mr. and Mrs. Starr, we will one day be able to brag that our child is causing a corrupt despot to tremble in fear of losing his usurped power.

Mr Robert Stacy McCain's old-fashioned folks came from Randolph County, Alabama. He graduated from Jacksonville State University and is a journalist with The Washington Times.