Outside View - Reviewing "The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values"

By Horace Cooper
UPI

May 19, 2003

Who would have guessed that the latest patriot in America's 21st century cultural battles would be a pro-choice lesbian feminist, but who better than Tammy Bruce, a former chapter head of the National Organization for Women, to give us the inside information about how serious is the challenge that American civilization faces? Her thesis is that the battle we are in is literally about whether "right and wrong" will continue to exist.

This former leftist warrior shares her experiences of working with gay activists and other cultural radicals. Her revelations tell us that things are not as bad as we feared. They are worse.

In "The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values," Bruce reveals the Left's bold shock-and-awe campaign to eviscerate America's culture and moral standards. Why? Because the Left is attempting a cultural regime change in order to impose a radical nihilism in its place.

Bruce pulls no punches. She acknowledges the Left's open season on children. She explains how the Left uses sex-education programs to promote sexual activity for them at the earliest ages. Bruce cites the texts of school workbooks and textbooks to show that bizarre and abhorrent behavior is encouraged for kids as young as 5 years old.

Bruce says what social conservatives have been afraid to say.

"Last I checked," she says, "it was good for children to be afraid of incurable STDs, HIV, depression and suicide. But the call to normalize and promote sexual activity among children has made advocacy for abstinence the deviant position."

Bruce's revealing discussion about the radical feminists' agenda puts into context the recent NOW official's complaint that charging alleged killer Scott Peterson with double homicide might cause people to think of the unborn as a person.

Presenting example after example of both eyewitness and documented news accounts, she exposes the hidden agenda of the radical nihilists who push their dangerous agenda under the cloak of tolerance and open-mindedness. But the truth is that these activists have a powerful hatred of U.S. institutions and our national identity.

Bruce leaves no stones unturned. She explains that the Left's attacks on the Catholic Church and people of faith in general is part of a concerted effort to take out key cultural foundations that stand in the way of their objectives. These counter-cultural hedonists use scientific analysis and academic research to eradicate any knowledge or awareness of our nation's intellectual and cultural foundations because "(i)gnorance sustains the moral relativists, and knowledge is to them as water is to the Wicked Witch of the West."

But she doesn't stop there. Other supposed sacred cows of the Left are exposed as well. Bruce acknowledges that Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson are "the sickest and most dangerous" in the black community yet they are "protected, supported and celebrated." Why? Because Leftists within the black community are motivated by a "deep-rooted hatred for their country and themselves." What Bruce calls the "Cult of Victimhood" provides "graphic and distressing examples of how much damage can be inflicted" on blacks when the "malignant narcissists are in charge." She charges that, "Black Americans are facing nothing less than libel at the hands of their so-called leaders."

If presidential candidate Bob Dole had claimed that the film "American Beauty" "hammered home the idea that there are no values, no morality, nothing virtuous to strive for" he would have been dismissed as a cultural crank. Bruce does so with the conviction of someone who has witnessed the intellectual vacuity of the Left and is willing to sound the alarm.

Part personal life story, part philosophical treatise, "The Death of Right and Wrong" is the compelling story of Bruce's philosophical journey from being a storm trooper among Left elite activists to a foot soldier in the culture war to save America.

With a moral clarity reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers in "Witness," Bruce warns us that unless we act now, we are doomed at the hands of cultural radicals who want nothing more than to undermine our ability to judge right from wrong in order to foist their own selfish, anything-goes society on the rest of us.

Horace Cooper is a senior fellow with the Center for New Black Leadership (cnbl.org), an organization that fosters the development of market-oriented, community-based public policies to solve economic and social problems affecting black Americans.