The sexual revolution has succeeded in making abortion and divorce an ordinary part of the lives of large numbers of Americans.

The Culture of Dishonesty: 

Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare

by Carson Holloway

Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.

President Obama, almost everyone now acknowledges, relied on misinformation to promote the Affordable Care Act while it was being debated by the country. He told voters that they could keep their existing health coverage if they liked it. That promise, however, was inconsistent with the actual structure of the law, as was revealed last fall by its implementation.

The consequences of this falsehood are grave. Under the law regulating the ordinary transactions of ordinary citizens, fraud or misrepresentation would void a contract. Contracts are supposed to arise from genuine consent, which is not present when one of the parties deliberately misleads the other. The Affordable Care Act is not, of course, a contract and is not governed by such laws. Nevertheless, the moral principle underpinning such laws would seem applicable even to products of the political process.

One may say that the most consequential federal legislation in decades enjoys only an impaired legitimacy according to fundamental American principles. Those principles emphasize the consent of the governed, but this law was enacted on the basis of a deception that is inconsistent with consent.

Most dismaying is the limited public reaction to the president’s now evident dishonesty. His approval ratings have fallen, and public trust in him has cratered. This is appropriate but hardly sufficient. No significant public figure has called for his resignation and no similar outrage has been expressed. This bodes ill for the future of genuine self-government. A people that cannot feel real outrage about being legislatively duped cannot, in the long run, exert any real control over the direction of public policy.

Given what is at stake in this relative indifference to President Obama’s dishonesty, we must ask: How did we get here? How did American culture grow so dangerously accustomed to falsehood?

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