12. THE WORLD'S SOLE SUPERPOWER

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE REAGAN-BUSH-CLINTON YEARS

Overall, America had certainly settled down a lot since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s.  America enjoyed strong, stable, and quite wise presidential leadership during the 1980s and 1990s.  But this did not mean that America was a completely harmonious society.  Indeed, a number of fundamental social (even spiritual) problems continued to tear at American society – especially as the world of the Vets gradually found itself giving way to the rising world of the Boomers – with a very different set of political expectations accompanying this major cultural shift.

The continuing advance of professionalism.  The American family took a huge hit – as personal professionalism as the supreme goal in life replaced the goal of a family and comfortable place in society, characteristic of the way the Vets went at life.  The workplace, not the home, was becoming the staging ground for life's most important endeavors.

And there – at the workplace – was the biggest of all problems – for feminists anyway because the workplace had long been dominated by men – and women were demanding equal opportunities to rise professionally, much like the men.  And when the system seemed not to move fast enough to accommodate these rising expectations – for instance women claiming to have hit a "glass ceiling" – when they seemed unable to rise to the top in their climb professionally – feminism turned increasingly militant.  Men were viewed not as partners in life but as the problem ... at times even the enemy.

"Progressives" picked up on the challenge and began to call for an end to the subtle ways men were given priority status in American culture.  "Inclusive language" was to be employed in all walks of life.  One could no longer talk about "man" as the representative of all humanity (such as in "paleolithic man").  Instead of mailman, the term mail-carrier was to be employed.  Congressmen became congressional representatives.  "Our men" at war were now "our men and women" at war.  Gender studies – or more directly, women's studies – were added as major fields of study at numerous colleges and universities across America (no men's studies however).  And virtually all men's colleges were forced to go co-ed (men and women students) – though numerous women's colleges chose to remain in that single-sex category.

In the Christian world the change was just as apparent.  Women were not only entering the Christian ministry in large numbers but even finally being appointed as Methodist (1980) and Episcopal (1989) bishops.  And, following the trend of the culture, the use of "inclusive language" even in Scripture reading, much less sermons and theological studies, became mandatory in many of the mainline denominations.

One of the more radical of developments along the feminist line was the November 1993 Re-Imagining Conference in which over 2000 women – mostly from the traditional mainline denominations – (plus some 80 men) assembled in Minneapolis to consider ways to rid Christianity of male-centered language which supposedly oppresses women – not to mention to end centuries of patriarchy which crushed the souls of women.  To strip God of masculine traits such as "our heavenly Father," the conference continuously referred to God as "Sophia," understood as the life-giving female God of Wisdom.  And a communion service was held in which milk was substituted for wine as the new sacramental element.  Lesbianism was honored (standing ovation) as the successful release from the oppressive male-dominated family system.

Ultimately the conference sparked enormous outrage of such mainline denominations as the Presbyterians and Methodists, whose national officers had originally contributed funding and planning for the conference, so that the movement backed down and no further attempts were made to go further down this road.

The Feminist/Liberal attempt to block the Supreme Court nomination of a conservative Black, Clarence Thomas (1991).  Things got explosive when in 1991 Bush had the audacity to nominate as a Supreme Court Justice a Black conservative, Clarence Thomas.  The large Democratic Party majority was not in the mood to see political conservatism grow within the Black world and tried to shoot down the nomination, the same way they had four years earlier when they threw full opposition to the appointment of another conservative (but White), Robert Bork.

And just the previous year another Supreme Court appointment by Bush, that of David Souter, barely got past the full-force opposition of the National Organization of Women, the NAACP and Senators Kennedy and Kerry, because Souter was a known "conservative," and such ideological bias had no place on the Supreme Court (meaning by someone who did not have the Democratic Party's ideological bias!).

Now the Democrats fully intended to block another conservative Supreme Court appointment by "Borking" Thomas (as the resistance action was coming to be termed).  Their effort to destroy the character of Thomas was built on the testimony of a Black female, Anita Hill, brought forward to testify about "inappropriate" behavior of Thomas towards Hill when she worked for him as a staff member.  But the effort was muddied greatly by the number of women staffers who came forward to testify strongly in favor of Thomas's excellent behavior as their boss, and the fact that Hill had followed Thomas from job to job, and that it was she who seemed to be initiating whatever relationship (which turned out to be not much) that actually existed between the two of them.  Thus the effort to "chauvinize" Thomas fell somewhat flat, and eleven Democrats found the way to vote in favor of his appointment, which passed 52 in favor and 48 against (again, with those 11 exceptions and 2 Republicans who opposed Thomas, the vote being along party lines).

Supreme Court appointments were now big political business, since the Court had taken up the responsibility of being the country's chief legislative branch of the federal government.