A return to Victorian values?

There is often talk amongst politicians, Christians, and other conservatives of a desire to return to the values of an earlier time. This has come up especially in the discussion about Same Sex Marriage, with calls for no "redefinition of marriage", with an assumption - tacit or explicit - that the concept of marriage as one man and one woman is something sacrosanct, divinely mandated, or similarly a perfect ideal that would make everything better.

This is, of course, utter drivel.

There seems to be a call for a return to a society where women and children have no rights at all. Where marriage is close to ownership of a wife by the husband. Where, for the vast majority of people, life expectancy is significantly lower, especially for the working classes. And child mortality is even higher. The only people who benefit are the few wealthy, white, males. The majority of people across the world were substantially worse off in this mythical time in the past.

So yes, hark back to these times if you are one of the wealthy, white, men for whom the society was supporting. But if you are not in this elite, life was difficult.

Ah, people say, but they did have a higher standard of morality then, didn't they?

Well, they proclaimed a different - maybe higher - morality, yes. Those who were educated mainly, who normally proclaimed a higher morality for others. On the whole, the morality proclaimed was not for the privileged, educated people declaring it, but for others. They did not always believe this moral standard should apply to them. Yes, there were exceptions, but the moral code they often taught was a moral standard that others needed to follow, for their betterment.

However, there is another reason why this call for a return to an earlier society is deeply flawed. The problem is, we are not "there", we are "here". It is all too easy to say that in another society, things were better, but we do not live in another society, we live in today. We need to apply our ideas and principles to the society that we live in now, otherwise, they are meaningless.

So the same sex marriage debate should not be conducted by saying that some other society was or is better. We live in the society we are in, where homosexuality is a significant part of our society, and we need to work with that, seek to help and support all the people in our society, whatever their sexual orientation, gender, race or whatever. We are where we are, and we need to deal with that, handle that, apply our theology/philosophy/morality to the world we live in, not a world we might wish we were living in (a world, that, usually, never actually existed).