I will agree with the poster who cited Playboy Magazine as a pivot point in the culture. I truly think it was too.
But while I think it was an accelerant to evil, it wasn’t the igniting spark or even the first flames.
I think we need to go back a long way to see the roots of it. To my mind, the roots of it all are moral relativism. That was the subject of the works of some very find minds, including Pope St. Pius X in his condemnation of “modernism”. “Modernism” is not “being modern” it’s moral relativism. Even Nietzsche wrote about it. It was what he mean by the “Death of God”. In other words, principles thought in previous ages to be objective truth were no longer accepted as such. What is “true” is what’s “true for me”, a subjective standard.
And so, if I am persuaded (or perhaps persuade myself) that homosexual acts are equivalent to sex within marriage, that’s “true for me” and therefore asserted as simply “true”, without reference to any standard (like Church teaching or the bible) that says it’s objectively “false”.
For us in the west, (and there are eastern analogues) the real spark was the protestant reformation. Protestantism means “I accept this part of former theology, but I reject that part. And I reject those teachings because I have arrived at a ‘truth’ of which I am personally convinced concerning that.”
How do we know something is objectively true versus simply subjective judgment? Well, some things are physically obvious, like the fact that large granite blocks are heavy or a certain level of radiation will kill. But in the moral sphere, we as faithful Catholics accept on faith (and some evidence as well as consequences) that Jesus is God and that He gave the Church the power to declare what is objectively good and objectively evil, with His own authority.
But most do not accept that, even a lot of Catholics don’t. They do not accept that they are rejecting the truth of God, but opt for the “truth” according to themselves without ever quite realizing that they are building a moral house on sand.
And so, when a society declares that, say, homosexual “marriage” is “good”, that’s an entirely subjective judgment based on the human arguments made in its favor. And if we accept that because so many do or because we get ourselves persuaded of it, we’re still opting for subjective determination of “truth” and rejecting the only objective truth available to us. It’s a habit of mind.
And further, when we think it’s entirely okay for children to be indoctrinated that it’s “good” or that abortion on demand is “good”, we’re rejecting the objective stated by Jesus Himself; “it were better than he hang a millstone around his neck and cast himself into the sea than to scandalize one of my little ones…” And we accept that on the flimsy ground that “…well, children need to know the issues of the day, so they can judge for themselve…”
But in a society in which we are persuaded that prohibition against “establishment of religion” means the society must be utterly secular; without even the assertion or tacit acceptance that there is an objective truth to follow, we’re all simply blowing in the moral wind, in which each man is his own judge and in which every subjective “truth” is equally valid with every other “truth”. The only real question is who has the power to impose his “truth” on others and the motivation to do it.
And subjectivism does, inevitably, lead to establishment of “truth” by “power” alone. Nietzsche posited the “Superman”; the man who is “beyond good and evil” (objectively) and who imposes his views on a populace that, by persuasion or force, accepts them.
But we say we don’t have such people; “that’s Hitler stuff or Lenin stuff”. But we do. We just have a lot of minor ones rather than a single major one. Roe vs. Wade was essentially decided by one man; the deciding vote on the Supreme Court. So was imposition of homosexual “marriage”. One man. Just one; the deciding vote on the Court. We have the “regulation” of one man requiring the Little Sisters to violate conscience or face punishment, and even some Catholics defend it. We delude ourselves if we think there are no “supermen” who are telling us what our morals should be and doing that which is (presently) in their power to make us act on them whether we accept them internally or not.
And, truth be told, there is a lot of it in the Church presently. Even here on CAF, we see citations to “church people” who are extremely dissident in many ways. “…it would be better if they hung a millstone…” But we don’t see it.
And to my professor’s credit, they didn’t attempt to dissuade me. One of them actually encouraged it.