Liberal living is designed to suppress feelings. It labels feelings that contradict the current narrative as bigoted.
If you are concerned about being dubbed a bigot, chances are you are not one.
The fact that I even stepped outside and started to question the liberal ethos I grew up in was already a statement of alienation from that liberal world. It was a statement that I had not made it, did not fit in, or was not tough enough for it. Liberals have contempt for non-liberals on the grounds that non-liberals are either bigoted, or have psychological problems, or both.
I knew liberals who benefited from traditional values, but would not acknowledge them.
I look back with irony at the liberals who enjoyed the financial and social benefits of marriage, but would never admit to it.
Helen grew up in the South. She and Charles married right after college, they were a year apart in age, the year was 1950. Charles had studied the classics, she studied to be a kindergarten teacher. They moved to London for about a decade, then to Brookline Mass, and became friendly with my mom, who by then had been widowed; my dad had passed away when I was seven years old.
I was a teenager when mom came home after work, full of astonishment and hurt. She said, “Helen called me and said, ‘I have someone who may be a good match for you. I have known him for three years.’ I said, ‘Helen, you have known someone for three years who you thought I should meet? Why did you wait three years?’ and Helen said, ‘Oh I just didn’t get around to it.’”
Although Helen was married, owned two apartments in Brookline, and was well off enough financially that when Charles developed heart problems she retired early to give him extra care, she somehow did not have the awareness that her friend who was a struggling single mother, who was saying that she wanted to remarry, should be considered when someone eligible came along.
Helen blithely excused herself by saying that she just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Helen was benefiting from marriage, but had grown callous to its benefits, even for a friend who said she wanted to marry, and who was struggling.
To live immersed in a secular relativist individualist culture means that even someone benefiting from an institution that decidedly does not derive from said paradigm becomes callous to it.
Marriage does not derive from secular relativism. It derives from scripture.
It is as if one cannot think two contradictory thoughts at once. Immersed in relativism, Helen did not even see her own life, her own privileged situation, and could not give it voice and shape and help another attain it.
This is where liberals and conservatives diverge - liberals do not think about what harm can come from a given paradigm - and that is a function of deep callousness, of trying to be the top superior strong one, and also out of fear of being dubbed bigot or old fashioned.
The fact that I even noticed meant that there was something strange about me, it was an admission that I had fallen through the cracks.
It is just that in the liberal relativist individualist world, there are a lot of those cracks.
