The Growing Cultural Divide

Being a guy who likes to follow current trends and events, I can’t help but notice growing evidence of a cultural Great Divide in our country. Let’s look at two recent developments…

On one hand, you have the tremendous popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey books. In case you aren’t familiar with it, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy follows a woman on her graphically erotic journey including (but not limited to) bondage, sadism and masochism. It has resulted in a whole new genre is being referred to as “mommy porn,” and the three books are currently ranked one, two and three on The New York Times best seller list. So obviously, there are many, many women (and perhaps some men too) enjoying what is by and large X-rated prose.

On the other side, local and national newspapers in the past week have published numerous photos of crowds demonstrating against gay marriage – a union between two consenting and loving adults of the same gender who generally practice whatever erotic business they carry out in the privacy of their own bedrooms, thus offending no one. There seem to be many, many protestors who feel they occupy such a moral high ground that they are permitted to tell others how to lead their lives.

Although I can’t back this statement up, I strongly suspect that very few if any of the folks protesting gay marriage were reading Fifty Shades of Grey as they rode on the bus to the protest site.

What can we take away from the fact that a significant portion of the population is reading medium-to-hard core porn while another significant group is bent on deeming just about anything that's fun to be immoral? I think we have become a nation divided, and the battleground is control of our culture, particularly the part that relates to sex and morality.

The troubling thing to me is that the chasm seems to grow wider every day. Women are reading porn in unprecedented numbers (and to be fair to women, online porn – which is mostly watched by men – is one of the most profitable businesses on the internet) while an expanding and increasingly vocal group of people are doing their best to return the U.S. to the “good old days” of no birth control, closet abortions, and no discussion of sex in classrooms or anywhere else.

With this cultural Great Divide, something has to give. And therein lies the problem.

The Tea Party, whose public agenda is cutting government spending and balancing the budget, is growing by leaps and bounds. There is talk that as of the 2012 elections, Republicans of the Tea Party ilk may have control of Congress. That worries me greatly, because it is painfully clear to me that there is also an underlying social agenda within the Tea Party that does not match the opinions of the great majority of Americans.  

Yes, we all would like a balanced budget and to see government waste eliminated. However, according to polls a majority of Americans also are in favor of the rights of gay couples, women’s reproduction rights and other social issues that the Tea Party vehemently opposes. Unfortunately, the Tea Party leaders have chosen to hide their sinister social agenda under the cover of economic reform. The two don't need to be interlinked, but the leadership of the Tea Party want it that way.

My book American Epitaph is based on the premise that the Tea Party Republicans gain power in 2012, resulting in a vast culture war that they eventually win. The resulting future that I portray in the book is not a very pleasant one for most people. I truly hope that we are not headed in that direction, but the way events are unfolding, I am worried that we are.