The following is a letter to the editor to Greenwich Post I authored. I am told it has to be cut back sharply to get printed (fewer pages and all). But I think it deserves a full airing on the internet:
On January 8, Greenwich Post columnist Joe Pisani wrote in his column ("Wrong is Wrong") that Americans have "reached the point where we can't tell right from wrong...It's a phenomenon that began back in the 1960's when we institutionalized moral relativism." This is the second time that Pisani has railed against the "Sixties". Last year, on the exact day when Barack Obama made history as the first African-American to accept the nomination for president of a major political party, Pisani wrote that the Sixties gave us nothing but "the sexual revolution, affordable pot, and tie-dyed T-shirts." That's all Pisani believes that the Sixties Generation gave America? Really?
Does Pisani include the Civil Rights Movement as a contributor to "institutional moral relativism"? Indeed, were Pisani's screeds against the Sixties, timed as the first one was to coincide with the nomination of an African-American by the Democratic Party, a thinly veiled Trent Lott-like criticism of integration? Does he believe that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 distorted our "moral compass", rather than, as most Americans believe, cleansing America of the great shame of institutional racism? Was he criticizing the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v Virginia that struck down laws forbidding inter-racial marriage? At the time he was born President Barack Obama's parents could have been jailed and prosecuted in 37 states, and had those laws not been eliminated this writer and his wife would be considered criminals today.
Does Pisani consider that the Women's Movement of the Sixties "pointed our moral compass in the wrong direction", the movement that opened virtually every area of American society to participation by women? Did opening the doors of the Ivy League universities to women constitute "moral relativism"? Was it moral certitude that had kept them closed? Is it "sinister" for women to make up nearly a fifth of our armed forces? Does he bemoan Hillary Clinton's historic and nearly successful campaign for president, or her nomination as our nation's top diplomat? Or does he mean to condemn the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut that established women's right of access to birth control, which in turn set the stage for the women's movement by giving women control over their reproductive lives?
Does Pisani believe that the movement to stop the senseless Vietnam War that claimed nearly sixty thousand lives and wounded over three hundred thousand more constituted "moral relativism"? Does he believe it was the environmental movement that distorted America's "moral compass"? Or, given that two of the three rogues he named in his column were Democrats, is he implying that the Democratic Party is to blame for our country's "wrong direction"?
Joe Pisani's screeds against the Sixties, the first coinciding with African-American Barack Obama's presidential nomination, raise disturbing questions whether he is criticizing racial integration, the women's movement, the anti-war movement, or environmentalism, the great movements of that decade. Greenwich Post publisher Thomas Nash owes it to his readers to ask Pisani exactly he meant to criticize, and then to answer to his readers in print. If Pisani was condemning those great contributions to American society, his column should be cancelled. This town deserves better.
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