Netherlands tired of "moral squalor"
Changing Patterns in Social Fabric Test Netherlands' Liberal Identity
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AMSTERDAM -- For years, W.B. Kranendonk was a lone ranger in Dutch politics -- the editor of an orthodox Christian newspaper in a nation that has legalized prostitution, euthanasia, abortion and same-sex marriage and allows the personal use of marijuana.
Today, with an orthodox Christian political party in the government for the first time, and with immigration anxieties fueling a national search for identity, the country that has been the world's most socially liberal political laboratory is rethinking its anything-goes policies.
And suddenly, Kranendonk no longer seems so all alone.
"People in high political circles are saying it can't be good to have a society so liberal that everything is allowed," said Kranendonk, editor of Reformist Daily and an increasingly influential voice that resonates in the shifting mainstream of Dutch public opinion. "People are saying we should have values; people are asking for more and more rules in society..."
The effort to rein in the Netherlands' famed social liberties is not limited to the small, newly empowered Christian Union party, which holds two of the 16 ministries in the coalition government formed this year. Increasingly, politicians from the more center-left Labor Party are among the most outspoken proponents of closing some brothels and marijuana shops -- known here as "coffee shops..."
"This toleration policy goes back 35 years," said Veling, snapping the lids off plastic boxes of pungent marijuana blends marked Neville's Haze and White Widow. "Now the word 'coffee shop' has become a symbol of something we don't like about society."
But historian Kennedy describes the attitude as a national "weariness with moral squalor -- the Dutch have grown tired of it and unwilling to put up with it."
Well I'll be, do you think the left in the U.S. will ever tire of the "moral squalor" they now advocate? It seems the Dutch are not only tiring of the "moral squalor," they're afraid they're losing control of their country and identity to an influx of immigrants:
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The Netherlands is going through the same racial, ethnic and religious metamorphosis as the rest of Western Europe: Large influxes of black, Arab and Muslim immigrants are changing the social complexion of an overwhelmingly white, Christian nation struggling with its loss of homogeneity.
But here those anxieties are exacerbated by alarm over the international crime organizations that have infiltrated the country's prostitution and drug trades, the increasing prevalence of trafficking in women and children across its borders, and dismay over the Netherlands' image as an international tourist destination for drugs and sexual debauchery.
"There is an uneasiness about globalization that the Dutch don't have control over their own country anymore," said James C. Kennedy, professor of contemporary history at the Free University of Amsterdam. "There is a more conservative mood in the country that is interested in setting limits and making sure things don't get out of hand."
It seems much of Western Europe is waking up, how long before America does?
