| | | There Was a Time When Governments Tried to Make Their People Better
JAN 2, 2024 6:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
6 COMMENTS
New in PJ Media:
The Biden regime seems hell-bent on celebrating and subsidizing the worst tendencies of human nature: not only every conceivable manner of perversion, but resentment, envy, the privilege of protected classes rather than advancement on the basis of merit, and so much more. It is not hard to suspect that Biden and his henchmen have some vested interest in encouraging Americans to become worse people, harder to get along with and more difficult to deal with. What could more effectively justify an authoritarian crackdown than a population that is as obstreperous as it is immature?
One outcome of all this will be that Americans will become worse people than they used to be. A government can’t expect to celebrate mental illness, demanding that everyone take it as normal on pain of ostracism, deplatforming and worse, and exalt skin color and gender over competence and expect that Americans will continue in large numbers to value being rational, competent, and capable.
There have been governments, however, that did what they could to make their people better human beings, rather than worse ones. “ Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization” details how, in the Byzantine Empire of the sixth century AD, a story circulated that could have come from our own day. The sixth-century Byzantine chronicler John Malalas reports that early in the reign of the renowned emperor Justinian, “some of the bishops from various provinces were accused of living immorally in matters of the flesh and of homosexual practices. Amongst them was Isaiah, bishop of Rhodes, an ex-praefectum vigilum [commander of the watchmen] at Constantinople, and likewise the bishop from Diospolis in Thrace, named Alexander.”
In Justinian’s realm, no month was set aside to celebrate such behavior. Instead, Malalas continues, “in accordance with a sacred ordinance they were brought to Constantinople and were examined and condemned by Victor the city prefect, who punished them: he tortured Isaiah severely and exiled him and he amputated Alexander’s genitals and paraded him around on a litter.” Justinian did not disapprove of these harsh punishments, and actually seized the opportunity to institute a strong measure against pedophilia: “The emperor immediately decreed that those detected in pederasty should have their genitals amputated.”
Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora, also considered it part of her duties to support the public morals. Malalas records that she acted against human trafficking:
Brothel-keepers used to go about in every district on the lookout for poor men who had daughters and giving them, it is said, their oath and a few nomismata [the coins of the day], they used to take the girls as though under a contract; they used to make them into public prostitutes, dressing them up as their wretched lot required and, receiving from them the miserable price of their bodies, they forced them into prostitution. She ordered that all such brothel-keepers be arrested as a matter of urgency.=
There is more. Read the rest here. |
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