Family Security Matters » Publications » Exclusive: The Emasculation of America

Family Security Matters » Publications » Exclusive: The Emasculation of America

May 22, 2009

Exclusive: The Emasculation of America

Leslie Sacks

A child's behavior may be life threatening or ethically egregious – the parent responds instinctively and arguably pragmatically and then modestly pats the posterior of the child to send an unambiguous and hopefully memorable response.

Yet in the America of today, parents do not have the same discretion the bureaucratic and monolithic government has and may face criminal charges, risking further legal castration of their parenthood.

This all while child slavery, rape, prostitution and trafficking is rife around the world, with America saying little and doing less to end this blight of inhumanity and degradation still everywhere all too common.

The contrast is stark and irreconcilable.

Are we educating and legislating for the emasculation of America, the softening and diluting of the maleness of half our population with the active (or at least tacit) support of the other half? It's as though our identity as a freedom-loving democracy is so porous and malleable that we identify more with the fascist certainties of our Jihadist adversaries; the victim takes on the jailor's persona.

We worry more about sleep deprivation at Guantanamo for the 241 hardened terrorists than about the two million innocents butchered recently in the Congo; we rail against humiliating self-admitted murderers by handling copies of the Koran without gloves, by our use of loud noises, isolation or cramped confinement, holding their faces immobile, by intense interrogations that the British, the French and certainly many other allies routinely use in extreme situations and certainly don't divulge, discuss or make public. We flagellate ourselves and prostrate ourselves before those who call for our destruction, apologizing for these indiscretions, these so-called human rights violations. We hold ourselves (but no others) to standards no civilization before us has ever considered remotely possible.

And yet we are the same county that wants to negotiate as equals with Iran and Syria, two medieval dictatorships that stone their women, incarcerate children and eliminate their opposition: no Geneva Convention anywhere in sight. We bow before the Saudi King, who allowed female students to burn to death rather than let them escape the flames inappropriately dressed; who beheads disbelievers and amputates limbs of everyday thieves.

The world is rife with genocide, with indiscriminate torture of the innocent and the young.

Yet where are our human rights movements, women's rights movements, our ACLUs and all those who rail against every transgression by our military and those who would make us safe, as imperfect as that process may be?

Why are we emasculating ourselves?

Do we believe that if we defang ourselves, make ourselves vulnerable, weak and fearful, that we will engender understanding and support from those who wish us ill? Will it reduce their jealousy and their hate? If we berate ourselves, humiliate our defenders publicly in court, weaken our defense and our interrogation techniques, then will we gain the love and the admiration of Ahmadinejad, of al Qaeda, of the Taliban? If we hate ourselves enough, if we belittle our democratic identity, our culture of freedom, our strength of individualism, then perhaps we reduce our hard-won differences so much, and our uniqueness and ennobling values, that we surely become like all others, the lowest common denominator, and thereby gain the empathy of radical Islamists, of extremists salivating at the chance to bring down America.

Is that all now our sociology of capitulation, our 21st century Psychology 101 of reverse warfare and universal equivalence? Must we beat our swords into ploughshares and validate Sharia law in every court, in every university, before we can be prideful as Americans? Are we compulsive lemmings rushing leftwards into the suicidal sea? When indeed will our emasculation end?