Can America Survive yet Another Culture War?

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Sometimes cliches really do hold some merit and intellectual value. In the case of American society, this old idiom still rings true, especially when coupled with the new culture war that seems to be breaking out everywhere. All of a sudden the national dialogue that had been nothing but jobs, foreign wars and more jobs is now being shifted to issues of morality and ethics, and old hot-button topics are bubbling up to the surface.

In the span of a week and a half there was a dust up over the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation pulling some of their funding to Planned Parenthood, and over the portion of the Affordable Health Care act that requires employers to give access to contraceptives regardless of religious or political beliefs. Both issues ignited on Facebook and Twitter, with the pressure being so great on Komen's board that they reversed their decision and ultimately fired one of their more controversial executives.

Add to the mix the fact that we're in the midst of a Presidential election and it would seem quite a volatile cocktail of rhetoric and political fervor has been cooked up. Republican candidates took the opportunity to really launch salvos in President Obama's direction. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich both made it a point to stir up animosity over what they are saying is a lack of respect for traditional Christian values in America. Gingrich went so far as to assert that Obama will begin a war on Catholicism if he's re-elected.

Now once again we find issues like abortion and religious values being debated on the biggest stage the country has, and focus is steadily shifting away from the Economy. This same fight has been waged numerous times. There was the rise of the Republican party in the 1990s, caused mostly by the reaction to scandals and sexual misadventures in the Clinton White House.

Perhaps though, a stronger parallel can be drawn between our current times and that of another time of civil tumult. In the 1960s and 1970s the country was plunged into a period of great change but also of great instability. Centered around both a fight for civil equality and an unpopular war that divided the nation's loyalties, the period was marked with assassinations, riots, and in some extreme cases even bombings.

What the GOP candidates have to decide is whether they really want to trundle down this path; the path towards yet another culture war. Can we as Americans really afford to go backwards and debate again the issues that nearly tore us apart back then? The similarities are there, and not hard to recognize at all. Now, just as in that time, there is a group of people fighting to be granted equal rights and protections to marry and pursue happiness, and we are entrenched in a war that doesn't seem to have a clear objective anymore.

What remains to be seen is if the Republicans can actually win an election this year fighting a battle of morals as opposed to one of economic ideals. Maybe they saw the growing discontent with the "One Percent" and that's why they've started attacking fellow Republican MItt Romney as an evil capitalist and have chosen instead to go back to their old armaments: America's bedrooms and places of worship.

Ultimately it may not be a question of a victory for either side of the aisle, but a question of whether the nation as a whole can take another battering like it did all those years ago. Can a society continue to evolve if every fifteen or twenty years it stops in the middle of the road and tries to decide whether it needs to backtrack and take a different road altogether? The truth is that Americans cannot allow themselves to be so distracted with these issues that they lose focus on the economic crisis that has laid waste to so many American's dreams of prosperity.