FWIW - Beyond the social conservatives

(Originally titled "How the Social Conservatives are ruining America")
A caveat to begin with; we reasoned that the title was just a little too inflammatory, so we dialed it back.
We use as our reference point the movie, "Pleasantville" (c) Newline Cinema 1998, starring Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy and Reese Witherspoon. If you saw the movie when it first came out and if you remembered the 1950's as I did, growing up in a little bedroom community (New Hyde Park, Long Island, N.Y.), this little gem was amazingly on-target in capturing the flavor of that decade.
For white, middle-class America, Father really did 'know best', the air was clean and sex was dirty. MAD magazine was still in comic book form, yet, even then very subversive, merrily skewering society's sacred cows.
For those who didn't see the movie, Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon are two teenagers who are magically transported back from current day to those days of yore (by a masterfully-played television repairman, Don Knotts; himself, of course as much a symbol of the 50's as hula hoops and 'D.A.' haircuts) to live in that era and reconcile their current-day mores with those of the 50's.
It doesn't take long for the dilemma to become apparent to these two. Of course, TV was black and white, not color, and they have become monochrome as has the town around them. It's a striking metaphor for the either/or frame of reference of those days. Black or White. Right or Wrong. No shades of nuance. You either were with us or agin' us; there was no safe middle ground.
Sound familiar? Well, the social conservatives have done all they can to return us to those halcyon days. Starting in the early 1980's the election of Ronald Reagan foreshadowed the societal division building even then. "Family values", the catch-phrase of the social conservatives, were the code words used to connote that "Pleasantville" ideal. This was the social norm that the conservatives sought to impose on American culture. All the way from Roe v. Wade to 'school choice' (a tactic to allow white households to remain removed from the requirements of integration), legislation that had served to enhance equality under the law was eviscerated slowly and systematically.
In 1993, when FBI crime statistics were released showing an overall decrease in the crime rate, some suggested that there was correlation between the effect of Roe v. Wade traceable to a decline in pregnancies that would have resulted in the births of unwanted children which would then have increased the crime rate. The social conservatives went ballistic. How dare anyone claim that unwanted children were responsible for crime? The social conservative's own political correct-ness kicked in!
It's been said that "...figures don't lie, but liars do figure..." and although we run the risk of offending those social conservatives, there are few other predictors available to dispute the conclusion. After all, the Reagan/Bush administration dissembled and de-funded social programs all over the place; ergo the conclusion must be that there were fewer births recorded for the demographic group (poor, marginally educated) that would be expected to contribute to the pool of unwanteds. And, perhaps that may have been the serendipitous result of such de-funding; fewer births to begin with.
So, perhaps we have hit upon the truth quite by accident; reduce the crime rate by starving the poor to death. Fewer poor people = lower crime statistics. How ingenious!

Next: President Bush's secret agenda: Armageddon!

Today is Monday, April 23rd, 2007. Only 639 days until the end of the Bush Administration.