Friday, March 17, 2006

Politics of sex

OpinionJournal - Wonder Land - Barry Bonds, Meet Andrew Fastow : There's more to morality than the politics of sex. : ""Bonds and Fastow were both into cooking," Dr. Wadler offered. "Bonds cooked the record books and Fastow cooked the financial books."

What's dying here may be a nation's common understanding of what's right and what's wrong. Business, sports, politics, publishing--they all seem to have something cooking. The Adelphi fraud and Tyco gross-out were yesterday. Today we've got Jack Abramoff's Washington, James Frey's falsified memoir and last week an economist in the news who swears he's proved widespread point-shaving in Division I men's basketball.

Secular society attempts to protect itself by deploying various bilge pumps. Sports has drug-testing; business and politics have heartless prosecutors. Entertainment has Oprah imposing a Maoist public shaming on publishing titan Nan Talese. None of these solutions is the answer. The possibility of doing things unprecedentedly new now in technology, science and finance arrives so fast that it's tough for the grinding wheels of law and procedure to keep pace.

Politics killed ethical formation.

A New York Times reporter assigned to visit the nation's conservative tribes said recently that when a pastor asks about his own religious practice, he demurs: "I don't think I should say what kind of church I go to, because these days that is political. It would be like saying what party I belonged to." Sounds whacko, but he's right. Today even the Ten Commandments are "political."

Entire presidential campaigns and Supreme Court nominations are fought now over someone's idea of morality. What's right and wrong has become as red and blue as our politics.

But look a little closer. These religious wars are about one thing: sex. "

1 comment:

Karthika said...

hmm, i dont think politics is the culprit here. Religion is, which gives people a false sense that everything in the world needs to be classified as 'right' and 'wrong'. this country is down the slippery slope that is religious fanaticism and the ironical thing is, that is what they claim to be fighting!
like bill maher so rightly says, 'Religion is a neurological disorder'