President Clinton's recent appearance at a "homosexual gala" in San Francisco received favorable national media attention. Advocating tolerance of same-sex behavior, his remarks were hailed as enlightened and courageous. This came on the heels of Vice President Gore's applauding lesbian actress Ellen DeGeneres for forcing Americans "to look at sexual orientation in a more open light."

What I find both fascinating and disturbing about the nation's two top political leader's countenance of homosexual behavior is how candid they are about their worldview of moral relativism. Their pitch goes far beyond the issue of "alternative" lifestyles. Clinton and Gore are speaking for those who seek to install a new set of moral absolutes in place of the traditional ones. The President asserted that morals are evolving and we simply must update standards of right and wrong to keep up with the times. "We're redefining in practical terms the immutable ideas that have guided us", said the President. However, if certain ideas can be changed they were by definition never immutable. An oxymoronic "evolving morality" is a radical contravention of the professed belief in transcendent reality and objective truth that's been held down through the centuries. Such a notion would have been unfathomable to the founding fathers who firmly wedded themselves to a fixed natural law and "inalienable rights". When certain ideas are indeed immutable, no one, not even the President or Congress, can change them.

In his speech, the President further suggested that our problem today is lack of imagination to see how morality should change. "Most people as they grow old", said the President, "become somewhat limited in their imaginations." Apparently the President sees an unbounded human imagination as the new definer of right and wrong. He further suggested that calling things by more benign names is an act of enlightenment that makes us more receptive to changing standards of behavior. In referring to homosexuality, he observed "over time we had to redefine these words because we are limited in our imagination of how we should live."

What has emerged in our political process is a view that nothing is true or good for all people at all time. Morality all depends on personal taste, preference, desire or circumstances. Author William Watkins writes, we now believe "truth and error, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal, and a host of other judgments are determined by the individual, circumstances or culture. There is no transcendent God or universal law we can point to that can inform us about who we are, what our world is like and how we should get along in it."

The Clinton-Gore view holds that each person's choice becomes their morality. Believing something, anything in effect makes it true for them. Everyone's choices and beliefs are then equally valid. Therefore, it is wrong to judge other choices, beliefs or lifestyles, except the belief in transcendent truth and objective morality is not be tolerated. With this new exalted virtue of tolerance, self gratification is in full bloom. We're hardly seeing the demise of absolutes but the substitution of the absolute of tolerance. The result: error freely masquerading as truth; calling evil good; calling good evil. In our pride, we have surely become as fools.

The President's admission that we should change words to mean something different than what reality itself expresses is quite telling. The President takes political-double speak to a new level by sanctioning language manipulation as a necessary tool for social re-engineering. When words are treated as silly putty, communication becomes a sleight-of-hand trick whereby we say one thing and mean another. For example, rather than "normal" meaning that things fulfill their design, "normal" is changed to mean that things happen on a regular basis, regardless of whether they are good or bad. As a result, things like homosexuality and abortion can be called "normal".

The President's and Vice President's worldview that cultural institutions, including government, should allow people to be all they can be, express all they feel and get all they desire can not and will not stand in the final analysis. Why? Because it goes against the grain of reality. Intuitively people know they can't just do anything they please and get along quite well. While our sensibilities may be dulled or marginalized, our built-in moral compass is not altogether obliterated. Even though we have become well practiced in rationalizing misbehavior, whether the disavowal of marriage vows, taking of innocent life by abortion, or campaign financing fraud, we retain knowledge of right and wrong by conscience, even as we seek to suppress or distort it. There are even support groups to help suppress the maternal instinct to preserve and protect an unborn child.

We were created with purpose in mind and designed to function in certain ways. For instance, the obvious anatomical design of male and female intends heterosexual relationship. Whenever our original design is abused, perverted or distorted dire consequences necessarily follow, not always immediately but invariably. Contrary to the Clinton-Gore worldview, the purpose of government is to resist those things that are destructive of life or devalue the worth and dignity of people, whether those things be hate crimes, bigotry, abortion, euthanasia, or "alternative" lifestyles, and to promote the fulfillment of that which is fitting and proper, that for which we were designed and to which our conscience bears witness.