Today on Family Talk, James Dobson interviewed Daniel Lapin, the Religious Right’s favorite rabbi with a history of extremist rhetoric and corruption. Dobson hailed Lapin at the beginning of the show as one of the most “brilliant” speakers in the country and asked him why he thinks American culture is a “mess” right now. Thankfully, Lapin knows just what is responsible for the collapse of civilization: the pill. According to Lapin, women who use the birth-control pill ruined masculinity and “created the possibility of perpetual male adolescence,” which went on to wreck traditional American values.
Dobson: How did we get in this mess? I mean, we can all see that something is going wrong, but why now? What’s going on right now?
Lapin: Again it is the tug of sexuality; it is not an accident. Future historians might say that the big dividing line between a time when American values really meant something and a time that we look today with unconcealed dismay at our own prospects, when do you think that began? Wouldn’t you agree that most people somewhere in the 1960s, back then in the ’60s perhaps one of the most notable events and I think its significance can hardly be exaggerated was the arrival of the birth control tablet in the early ’60s. What that did for the very first time is it created the possibility of perpetual male adolescence, it made it possible for the first time for men to really never grow up and essentially it transformed masculinity with all the implications of honor and respect and courage and the ability to defer gratification, everything that we think of as responsible masculinity, and got transformed into a very simple question, ‘did you remember to take your pill honey’?
