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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3928 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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the domination of the moral majority

Was nonexistent.

You're not from the Bible Belt, are you? Christian zealots ran the show and were quite controlling in the 90s. Into at least the late 2000s they were teaching only creationism in science class and punishing kids at my public school for not participating in prayers or having books like Harry Potter or the Golden Compass.

Cracks didn't start showing in that dominance until the late 2000s with growing internet access providing locals who weren't with the program access to secular spaces, plus I think the close marriage between the Bush administration and evangelicals drove some wedges and made being a Southern Baptist less of an everyone thing and more of a Republican thing.

Was it really? I suppose this is one of those "my enemies are both strong and weak" things, but the old Moral Majority certainly could and did throw their weight around. It all seems quaint in hindsight and with the passage of time, and especially in comparison to today's new ideologies, but back then, nobody realized that "Judeo-Christian Morals" were a dying meme--quite the opposite, in fact! The Nine Inch Nails concept album Year Zero imagined a world where Tipper Gore/Mary Whitehouse moral concern, megachurch Christianity, and Bush-era jingoism were fused to create a dystopian America. That was in 2007.

Need I dredge up the tragedy of Jack Thompson? It's not a story the Jedi would tell you.

I even really liked that album. I can't help but think of it when looking back at how totally off we were, since I was very much of that crowd. Nice production, though.

Need I dredge up the tragedy of Jack Thompson?

A man who accomplished literally nothing other than discrediting himself? I mean you can if you want, I guess. Not sure where you're going with that though.

Was it really?

Yes.

but the old Moral Majority certainly could and did throw their weight around

If you mean the literal Moral Majority, it disbanded in 1989.

The Nine Inch Nails concept album Year Zero imagined a world where Tipper Gore/Mary Whitehouse moral concern, megachurch Christianity, and Bush-era jingoism were fused to create a dystopian America. That was in 2007.

Yes, key word being "imagined". Much like the Handmaid's Tale in a later era.

If you mean the literal Moral Majority, it disbanded in 1989.

Yeah, that group wasn't around in the 90's, but the spirit was definitely still there, I'd argue.

To what effect? In what way, in the 90s, did the moral majority actually exert meaningful influence on the culture, or on individuals?

Religious abuse of children and non-believers, censorship, restricting access to contraceptives and abortion, practicing marriages between children and adults, discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians, discrimination against sexual minorities, violating church-state separation, etc.

Religious abuse of children and non-believers

What is "religious abuse" of children? How were non-believers abused, exactly?

censorship

What censorship, specifically? Every attempt at censorship I saw in the 90s failed utterly. Carlin suffered no significant consequences for saying "the words you can't say on TV" on TV. Internet porn proliferated beyond all measures. Attempts to restrict artistic output, even when that output had obvious, legible, serious negative consequences, were uniformly rejected.

restricting access to contraceptives and abortion

How was it restricted? Roe was the law of the land. Condoms were handed out in public schools as a routine matter.

practicing marriages between children and adults

I have zero doubt that some religious people somewhere did this. Where was it done in socially significant numbers?

discrimination against atheists and other non-Christians

What discrimination, specifically? Who was discriminated against, and in what contexts?

discrimination against sexual minorities

Discrimination how, and against which sexual minorities? You know Matthew Shephard's murder wasn't actually a hate-crime, right?

violating church-state separation

What violations, specifically?

...I'm intimately familiar with the narrative that the 90s were a horror-story of oppression by moral busybodies, but I actually lived through them. The moral busybodies wanted to censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law, but they were completely unable to do so in any practical sense. Meanwhile, the people who decried their "restrictions" have gone on to actually censor, restrict freedom, and otherwise impose their values through force of law to a degree that is completely beyond even the caricatures they've generated of their opponents.

Those "explicit lyrics" labels were so oppressive, man...

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