News Aug 12, 2010 at 7:53 am

Comments

1
i hate it when these articles don't mention viagra. i mean, if you're gonna be all up on a moral high horse, try and at least get it somewhat even between men and women
2
How old was Cal in the 1950s? Like, ten? How would a ten-year-old know what the 1950s were like, beyond his back yard and the school playground?
3
He really is seriously deluded. He longs for a past that was never what he thinks it was. We have slowly advanced the rights of people that Thomas and his ilk, in their arrogance,narcissism and self righteousness, look down on. And Dan, don't forget how gay people were blackmailed. Blackmailing was supposedly one of the reasons why gay people were thought to be bad risks for the military.
4
Born in 1942, so he remembers the '50s, but only as a teenager.
5
@2

Good point, every ten year old thinks the world is just full of sunshine and rainbows. When I was ten my biggest concern was whether or not the M's would make the playoffs, the world seemed so wonderful.
6
Thank goddness there wasn't any pornography, fornication, or guy on guy action in the few thousand years preceeding the 1950s, or things might really have gotten out of hand.
7
Don't forget McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Oh and the lovely threat of world war III.

Good times?
8
Never trust a guy with a haircut like that.
9
"The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s included the twentieth century's highest teen birth rates (respectively 79.5, 91.0, and 69.7 per thousand). By 1960, nearly one-third of American females had their first child before reaching age twenty."

Yep, 91 teen births per one thousand. Those were the days of morality and sexual restraint. Thank God they didn't have birth control pills or easy access to condoms. They might have had sex without making babies.

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/So-Th/Teen…
10
Cal Thomas may look back at the last 60 years and see a moral breakdown; I look back at those same 60 years and I see a moral buildup. We replaced old ideas of morality that had outlived their usefulness and replaced them with new morals that our changing society desperately needed. In no case was an old moral discarded, or a new one adopted, without carefully considered and compelling reasons. Not our fault you weren't paying attention, Cal.
11
David Crowe has a wonderful bit about an old lady scolding him for using "offensive language" in his comedy routine.

Old lady: "Back in my day, we didn't speak like that!"
David Crowe: "Lady, back in your day, the drinking fountains said 'WHITES ONLY.' Now the drinking fountains say 'ALL THIRSTY MOTHERFUCKERS WELCOME!'"

12
You can't call him wrong. Same-sex marriage wouldn't be happening today were it not for the changes to gender norms brought on by kick ass women who fought for control of their biological and relational destinies.

Unfortunately, women tend to support their reproductive and and divorce related freedoms more frequently than they do same-sex marriage and gay rights. Those women should read Cal Thomas and realize that NOM et al won't stop at marginalizing same-sex families.

When they say "marriage is one man and one woman" what they mean is "marriage is one man and one woman who has no rights."

All women should support equality for gays. Gay's are bad (especially male gays, which is why male gays have been the subject of much more governmental oppression (see Iran)) because they undermine the narrative of "natural", "god ordained" male headship of family and society.

Let's face it, same-sex marriages do threaten to harm Cal Thomas. They threaten his "natural" position as a social alpha. Same-sex families don't threaten traditional marriages, but they do threaten to end the exclusion of women from leadership positions in companies, governments, and churches.

Gotta remember, homophobia is hatred of women!

Which is why some gays need to stop being sexist assholes.
13
@9 - I can easily believe that. When I was a kid in the 1960's, every single high school teen girl on my block got knocked up and got married. All of them. It was quite the thing to put a false date on the marriage certificate so that it looked like the marriage took place pre-conception.
14
When conservative assholes wax nostalgic about the 1950s, I like to remind them that the top marginal tax rate back then was 91%. Shuts 'em up pretty quick.
15
Wait, so those old black and white tv shows and movies are *lying* to me? This is an unprecedented future anthropological disaster!
16
Dan,

I thought you wouldn't mind terribly if I used your words to ask Cal directly, so I went to his website:

http://www.calthomas.com/contact.php

and sent him the following e-mail:

I was hoping you could address your recent comment "We have been spiraling downward for some time, beginning in the ’50s." Specifically, I would like to know how you align your thoughts with the realities detailed below and conclude that the nation had a stronger moral sense then?

During the 50's we had Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, redlining, and poll taxes; "pillars of society" could beat and rape their wives without fear of prosecution; desperate women risked their lives to obtain back-alley abortions (dying from an illegal abortion was just one of those "biological consequences" that helped women maintain their "moral sense" when it came to sex); smart and ambitious women were relegated to secretary pools until they were handed valium prescriptions and incarcerated with their children in the suburbs; anti-Semitism was still a respectable pastime ("restricted" country clubs, universities, suburbs); and gay people could be harassed, fired, and murdered with impunity.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to respond.

Regards,

Matt
17
Cal Thomas?
18
New rule, No invoking the past if you are unhappy with the present.
19
Don't forget what a culinary wasteland 1950s North America was. Mexican? Ha! Sushi? Ha! Forget all the deliciousness that is South Asia and the Middle East. I think pizza was considered exotic.

Sorry. I just had lunch.
20
The trouble is that the 1950's was a golden age for the middle class, economically speaking. Civil rights advancements and economic concerns are somewhat separate, of course, but most people don't realize that (and aren't aware of the economic policies of that era that created that strong middle-class) so arguments like Thomas present make a certain amount of sense to people.
21
This screed by Cal Thomas should be enshrined as the Constitution of Conservative America. Mr. Thomas has nearly perfectly encapsulated the entirety of conservative thought in a simple-to-read and easy-to-deflate essay. He's really done us a favor here, by not hiding any of the cliches of conservatism.

To that I say Bravo Mr. Thomas. You've done as much as anyone to embolden progressive politics. May your example be held low, for all to trample on as we move boldly toward a better world.
22
In his defense Call is not always on the wrong side >> http://www.calthomas.com/index.php?news=…

Ew...I feel dirty.
23
@ 2, and 5 .. i got called a nigger when i was ten. (actually i was eight when that first happened . i was born in '54 chicago, south shore was predominantly white when we lived there ) . white boys chased me , spat at me, taunted me and threw rocks and threatened my life with bodily harm almost on a daily basis. my teachers humiliated me in front of the class until i cried and then told me to cut it with the crocodile tears..the tv was a nightly mess of angry grown folks with guns, fire hoses, german shepards and get to the back of the bus.. jfk got shot when i was 9 malcolm died a year. later.some guy slaughtered 8 nurses on the other side of town and i didn't sleep for weeks. i saw it, heard it, went through it and remember all of it. what i don't remember was rainbows. it would have been a little more pleasant if i saw a few more of them.
good times...
24
@6: In the Oriental Institute Museum in Hyde Park (Chicago), there is some honest-to-God, carved-in-stone ancient Mesopotamian pornography.
25
Gloria, @18, that's an awesome addition to the facts.

LukeJoe@ 12: precisely


Let's face it, same-sex marriages do threaten to harm Cal Thomas. They threaten his "natural" position as a social alpha.

26
..@ 2 & 5.. oh and ummm and there was also that war thing..
27
I was born in 1957. Many of my friends born in the 40's and 50's discovered somewhere along the line that their parents married only six or seven months before the first child was born. Not coincidentally, many of the parents were married at 18, 19 or 20. While the marriages may have been seen as socially "responsible," many of them were also hasty and ill-advised.

I also have a friend born in 1956 who was stigmatized while growing up because he was the child of an unmarried woman and the proverbial travelling salesman. This salesman never visited his son, and never contributed a penny in child support, because back in that moral decade of the 1950's, if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock, that was her bad luck. Men got a pass.

28
This editorial is a treasure trove. Cal outs himself as a theocrat right off the bat, calling judge Walker a "false god" for striking down a law with its basis in "tradition dating back millennia (not to mention biblical commands." He then proceeds to compare judges who rule in a way he doesn't like to Caesar, warns of our country's impending punishment at the hand of the Almighty, predicts we will be "conquered" by terrorists, and then paints the most terrifying picture of this whole screed:

"Judge Vaughn Walker has joined a conga line of similarly activist judges who are accelerating us down the path to destruction."


A conga line! Could there be anything gayer? We're in a conga line to hell, people. And it all started in the 1950s, which brought us "easily available pornography," among other social ills. (I guess pornography was okay as long as it was difficult to obtain?)

Finally, Cal busts out the money quote:
"Muslim fanatics who wish to destroy us are correct in their diagnosis of our moral rot: loss of a fear of God, immodesty, especially among women, materialism and much more"


In case that quote's a little too long for you, let me trim it down:
Cal Thomas says "Muslim fanatics who wish to destroy us are correct."


Well, there you have it. Thanks, Cal.
29
@12,

What makes you think all women support rights for *women*?
30
Hey Venomlash, I remebered this post about a prehistoric dildo from over at Betty Dodson's site:

http://dodsonandross.com/blogs/carlin/20…

There was a comment on another site (Em & Lo) that it was only 4" because people were smaller then...and that it probably wasn't a dildo at all, it was probably just a back massager...

31
All I can say is I greatly prefer the journalistic work of Cal Thomas's twin brother, Herbert Kornfeld.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/keep-yo…
32
@20 - true. And why is that? Because of the unions. A combination of unions and regulated capitalism built the strongest middle class the world has yet seen. And yet these same "conservative" fuckwits have done everything in their power to destroy both the unions and regulated capitalism, despite their oft-proclaimed "support" for the middle class. What these assholes want isn't the 1950s, it's the 1880s. They all want the robber baron era back. Not just rollbacks of what Franklin Roosevelt accomplished, but rollback everything his uncle Teddy accomplished, too.
33
@30: Back massager, eh? That's what the first vibrators were marketed as...

DOUBLES GET!
34
We still have poll taxes in washington state.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.