the new normal

I am in the middle of reading Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation by Ruth Wisse and came across this remark that so perfectly describes the transformation that has taken place in our sociery (p223):

Not all the changes were equally unwelcome.  I thought decriminalization of homosexuality and abortion long overdue.  What hadn't occurred to me was that, in the rush to nonjudgment, tolerance would turn to advocacy, and advocacy into reverse orthodoxy...Having held standard views about the primacy and nature of family, I was stunned at how quickly those assumptions fell away.

The evidence of how far the "progressives" have led our society toward its moral destruction has been apparent long before we reached the climatic point of a Supreme Court nominee who cannot even define what a woman is.  

Given that this is what passes for cultural norms these days, how is there any room for a Torah-v'... whatever-you-want-to-call-it philosophy that embraces that outside culture?  Standing up and voicing support for Israel is enough to get you shouted down on most college campuses these days.  Add to that the conservative values that are inherent to our religion and I think you will find yourself a pariah in most intellectual circles.  The "reverse orthodoxy," as Wisse put it, has made what once was radical into the norm.  Refusing to kneel and accept that new normal will get you labelled a rascist/homophobe/chauvinist/etc. 

Getting back to Wisse, one other interesting quote (and I could pull many from the book!) is what she writes regarding the decision by JTS to ordain woman (p228):

Even someone as deficient in Talmudic expertise as I could see that the movement's avowedly cautious and "conservative" approach to innovation had been unceremoniously sacrificed to modern feminist pressure.  Had JTS' rabbinic authorities really framed their arguments for this decision in conformity with the movement's own guidelines?  Had a cohort of female Talmudists risen to rival or surpass their teachers in mastery of sources?  Had growing synagogue membership and intensified devotion on the part of conservative women required such a tradition-defying innovation?

Had any of those been the case, the decision might have marked a religious breakthrough.  Instead, Judaism was being asked to align itself with the tenets of the new women's movement without subjecting those tenets themselves to the slightest scrutiny.  The relaxation of norms, I felt certain, would simply hasten the decline in religious observance that had prompted the movement to inaugurate the change, and JTS to bless it in the first place.  Judaism's hard internal logic was necessary in tension with the pressure for progress at any cost, and giving in to change without anticipating the unanticipated consequences was a recipe for even greater assimilation.