Sex In America

John Edwards, former candidate for President, has acknowledged having an illicit sexual relation. His marriage has been betrayed. The public has verbally pummeled him. His mendacious actions are reprehensible. When his concupiscence was exposed his deception was finally admitted. His actions were repudiated by most American as unacceptable. They didn’t meet our broadly accepted moral standards.
However, even a casual observer of TV sitcoms knows what was once considered promiscuous sex is now the cool thing. It is represented as the norm, the thing to do, talk about and laugh over. It is the basis of most intended humor in our entertainment. Our heroes and heroines in the media are more promiscuous than Hugh Hefner or a neighborhood cat. They have an insouciant attitude about sex.
Illicit sex is so open and blatant that it must leave parents of small children with a lot to explain. In the mean time children are growing up seeing it as almost normal. Gone are the days when in our media two persons of the opposite sex could have a good personal relationship without sex entering the picture.  That is the norm that is downplayed in our entertainment.
Check the news racks that line the check-out lines in stores and try to find one feature related to a well balanced marriage or a celibate star or starlet. Stories about super-models who want to have babies but don’t want to marry sell-not celibacy. Baby bumps by unwed prospective moms are big news. Five million opposite-sex couples in the U.S. live together without the benefit of marriage. Thirty-eight percent of all children in America are born out of wedlock costing taxpayers $112 billion a year.
A “Sex in the City” or “Desperate Housewives” culture never hints of virtue, chastity, moral integrity, or fidelity.
Why then beat up on John Edwards?
Because there is still a significant core in America that believes in fidelity and values the sanctity of marriage.
To paraphrase statesman William Penn “Immorality is still wrong, though all be for it and virtue is still right though all be against it.”
C. S. Lewis in his work “The Abolition of Man” refers to moral maxims as “Tao.” These maximums constitute our human moral inheritance. They are starting points for moral reasoning, deliberation, and conduct. The moral and spiritual earthquake in our culture is shaking these foundations. Any society that has tried to stand on morally neutral or empty ground has found it impossible to have any moral reasoning. Tao is as essential to civil life as axioms are to mathematics.
Aberrant appetites and desires cause people to want to ignore what moral reasoning requires. Without proper moral education our cherished freedom to make moral decisions will give license to be inhuman in any personally desirable manner.
History teaches us that when the freedom members of a society seek most is the freedom to do what ever they want freedom is lost.
Many in the media in America are seeking to reeducate our society on a new morality using entertainment as the means.
Are you involved in any organization that teaches the long held moral standards we inherited?