I found this essay while researching something else. It makes some very interesting points regarding the breakdown of morals in this country.

Denise Noe
Calling Down The Fifties: The Religious Right As A Cargo Cult
October 25, 2006 at 3:25 pm · Filed under Vox Populi

To sum up the aims of any major social/political movement requires simplification; to summarize those aims without bias is difficult when coming from outside that movement.

It is vital to depict what is generally referred to as either the Religious Right or the Family Values Right, in a disinterested manner if we are to understand its powerful appeal to millions of Americans.

Liberals and feminists (two distinct though often overlapping groups) frequently exaggerate the goals of the American Religious Right. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was a brilliant novel but the Nation of Gilead is not the country most members of the American Religious Right want to live in. Generally speaking, our Religious Right does not seek to make the United States a Western version of Iran or Afghanistan. They do not want a Christian dictatorship. The Religious Right is, for the most part, anti-racist--rejecting any parallel between racism and sexism. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, and their followers evince little appetite for enacting the Old Testament punishments of execution against adulteresses or homosexuals.

Roughly speaking, it is fair to say that the American Religious Right wants to outlaw abortion, push gays back into the closet, eliminate welfare (or at least radically decrease it), cut taxes, return to a dominant male breadwinner and submissive female homemaker model for most marriages, and continue building up the Pentagon.

One is hard-pressed to understand these goals by turning to the Bible. While there are Biblical passages that can be interpreted as advocating what we have come to call, however misguidedly, “patriarchy� or more commonly a “man’s world,� crushing a feminist movement which would form some two to five thousand years in the future is not a primary aim of that Book. Abortion gets scant attention. The proper levels of taxation and government spending are not dwelled upon in either the Old or the New Testaments. Though both Testaments contain passages that can be interpreted as condemning male homosexuality, and the New Testament includes one which may rebuke lesbianism as well, this still only partially explains the Right's views on the subject since, as noted, the mainstream groups do not demand a return to the Biblical punishments for other private, consensual sex acts, nor do they wish to impose many other Biblical injunctions (say, that against wearing clothes made out of more than one type of material).

The "anti-government" rhetoric of many on the Right leads up another blind alley for those trying to understand its aspirations. After all, they demand government intervention between a doctor and a woman seeking an abortion. As is true of most on the Left, the Right wants to keep the government spending ever more on the war against recreational drug use.

Where can the model for the Religious Right's agenda be found? The thesis of this essay is that they want to return to the America of the 1950s -- with the vital exception that they do NOT want to revive the racial discrimination prevalent during that period.

The Positives

During the Fifties, much of the United States of America lived under a tacit economic deal that permitted a single breadwinner family to have what was then regarded as a middle-class lifestyle. For the most part, married men worked nine to five; wives took care of the kids.

It was, for many women, a time of relative "liberation." As feminists have rightly pointed out, with the exception of a minority of females in the elite classes, women have always worked -- and always been subservient to men, although the degree that subservience has tended to be exaggerated by many people of varying beliefs.

The difference during the Fifties was that families that were not rich could afford to have a wife who was not economically productive. Thus, American married women as a group were, for the first time in history, granted a certain amount of leisure in compensation for the (often superficial) “submission� which was a given in male/female relationships.

"Leisure" in this case should not be confused with mere idleness. The housewife of the Fifties was often very busy -- and rather independent.

For one thing, the suburbanization of the period meant that the automobile became a mother's tool. Driving a car lost most of the masculine connotation it previously had (and still does possess in some parts of the world; the seemingly most “male supremacist� nation on earth, Saudi Arabia, forbids women to drive), as taxiing the kids to school, dentists, doctors, parties, scout meetings, music practice, and church activities became women's work.

Men - -or at least the majority of white men -- had job security. The G.I. Bill allowed many returning soldiers to go to college and, thus, attain highly skilled professional positions.

The plethora of physical strength-oriented factory jobs meant that men, even without higher education, could "make it" to the extent of supporting their families if they plugged away and played by the rules

The importance of this cannot be overestimated for the Great Depression, which was still fresh in the country's mind, had been a special trauma for the masculine psyche, as masses of American males were unable even to contribute to their family's support. Joseph Pleck, in The Myth of Masculinity, argued that the Depression was "the single greatest crisis in the traditional and institutional basis of the male role, that of family economic provider."

The "living wage" which the vast majority of non-minority men earned meant that they could expect a homemaking wife who allowed them the final word and children who looked up to them as head of the house.