O Tempora, O Mores again!

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Daniel Henninger about the cultural civil war now besetting the U.S.A. Like Freud, Henninger says it all boils down to sex.

As Jay Leno apostrophized the whole problem the other nite, in my less-than-total-recall: "Republican Senator So-and-so turned down a large political donation the other day; that's like a Democrat saying no to a hooker." Or words to that effect.

The subtext is that Republicans are puritanical and the Democrats are post-modern. Or Apollonian and Dionysian. Or stuck on money and stuck on sex. Raw carrots vs. cooked carrots or vice-versa. Henninger sums it up:

Our political culture's preoccupation with sexual boundaries has smothered the more important ability of religious or ethical formation to function in the U.S. Currently the most rigorous whole-person moral system resides among evangelical right--at least in terms of keeping one's earthly life in perspective. But because the religious right has "positions" on abortion and homosexuality, politics seeks to undermine its entire function in the life of the nation.

Inner-city parents desperate to use vouchers to send their children to values-forming parochial schools can't, because the reigning political calculus holds this would somehow "advantage" an abortion-resistant Catholic Church. Meanwhile the only values taught now in public schools are diversity, tolerance and respect for the environment. I'll bet Andrew Fastow and Barry Bonds believe in all that to the bottom of their souls.

Let's admit the bitter irony of the unending sex wars. They've obliterated the ability to talk rationally in public about anything that smacks of "religion." Too political. Thus a modest proposal:

Maybe it's time for the sex obsessives on the left and right to take their fights over abortion and gay rights into a corner somewhere and give the rest of society space to restore some ethical rootedness in an endlessly variable world. Because letting the vacuum persist long enough on values useful to everyday life will breed too many little Bonds and little Fastows. And because the constant public magnification of these ethical breakdowns makes everyone feel like scuzz by association. It has a corrosive affect on the rest of us, on our sense of who we are.