Subject: (Editorial):  The Joy of What?  
Date: Published: 12/12/91 (98 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    The Joy of What?  

    If we have just lived through 25 years of the Sexual
 Revolution, it looks as if a lot of people might be ready for
 the Counter-Revolution.
    In the last half of 1991, the American people watched a
 Senate committee discuss Long Dong Silver with a nominee for
 the Supreme Court of the United States, learned that Magic
 Johnson had contracted the AIDS virus, watched the New York
 City Board of Education hand out condoms to adolescents and,
 as the Christmas season began, listened to a nephew of
 President John F. Kennedy describe on the evening news how a
 woman he had picked up in a Palm Beach bar "massaged" him
 until, as was noted on the front page of Newsday yesterday,
 "I ejaculated."
    Does anyone want to step forward and claim responsibility
 for all this?  This is the joy of what?  
    The following story sounds like a stand-up comic's joke,
 but it is true:  A father was sitting in his dining room about
 7:00 Monday evening, reading the paper and hearing the worst
 sort of prime-time-access drivel pouring out of the TV in a
 nearby room.  He shouts:  "Can't you kids find something better
 to watch than that junk?"  Click, click and on comes the
 evening's news:  "...raised the question today of whether
 William Kennedy Smith had in fact been able to sustain a (you
 know what) during his encounter with the alleged victim."
 Dad:  "I see here where `The Addams Family' is on now."  Click.
    Here's another true story, but it doesn't sound like a
 joke:  Last Tuesday the Census Bureau reported that one in
 four women who gave birth to a child in the previous year
 wasn't married.  Since the mid-1970s, the rate among white
 women (actually, a lot of them are girls) had doubled and now
 stands at 17%.  As a footnote, the report notes that a lot of
 the children were born into "two-parent families" -- except
 that the two people weren't married.
    At least their commitment to each other was somewhat
 stronger, apparently, than that between William Kennedy Smith
 and the woman who testified on TV with the blue cloud in
 front of her face.  It is intriguing to wonder how the country
 could have become so transfixed by what, at bottom, was the
 story of two barflies.
    The Kennedy name accounts for much of it, but not all.  The
 media have served as the revolution's tuning fork, pitching
 at us every conceivable modulation of these more open
 "relationships."  It seemed uncertain, though, whether the
 Palm Beach rape trial was another turn in the recent politics
 of sexual victimization or just another turn through
 checkout-counter journalism.  Maybe at the end of the day,
 this affair was about something altogether alien to
 contemporary culture, namely sin.
    Sin isn't something that many people, including most
 churches, have spent much time talking about or worrying
 about through the years of the revolution.  But we will say
 this for sin; it at least offered a frame of reference for
 personal behavior.  When the frame was dismantled, guilt
 wasn't the only thing that fell away; we also lost the
 guidewire of personal responsibility.
    The revolution devalued personal responsibility because
 that implied unacceptable moral coercion, but it never quite
 produced its "magnum opus" on the proper conduct of sexual
 relations.  Everyone was left on his or her own.  It now
 appears that many wrecked people could have used a road map.
    Like Magic Johnson.  With a few dissenting exceptions, 96
 hours and 96 zillion column inches of sentiment washed over
 the falls about how all this proved the need for "safe sex"
 before someone finally said that Magic Johnson's sex life
 was, simply, wrong.  The view of the "hero," Magic Johnson,
 was, "All I had to do was wear condoms."  Then Martina
 Navratilova blew the whistle, saying that if a woman had
 admitted to having hundreds of partners, they'd call her a
 "slut."
    Slut is an old-fashioned word.  It carries a degree of
 moral judgment, and that's not done much anymore, at least
 not in print or on TV.  Among intellectuals and commentators,
 judgment was long ago replaced by therapy.  Ministers and
 priests gave way (voluntarily) to clinics and counselors.
 Instead of giving your kid a dressing-down, you now give him
 (or her) a condom.  The ministers of the therapeutic say the
 dressing-down is useless because the kids don't know what
 you're talking about anyway.  By now, that may be right.
    This is not an appeal for prudery; it is an appeal for
 prudence.  Prudence implies some skill, which can be taught,
 at exercising judgment, at making distinctions.  The United
 States has a drug problem and a high-school-sex problem and a
 welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem.  None
 of this will go away until more people in positions of
 responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in
 frankly moral terms, that some of the things that people do
 nowadays are wrong.

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