Practice this line: “You keep saying ‘morality’ but really you’re just talking about sex.” Homosexuality, promiscuity, and obscenity are just sexual issues. Even abortion turns into a sexual issue if your real goal is punishing promiscuity rather than saving fetuses.
Sex barely scratches the surface of morality. If your moral code instructs you to bring honesty, integrity, and compassion into all your human relationships, it’s not clear that you need any special rules about sex at all. When Jesus listed the admission standards for Christians to get into Heaven (Matthew 25), not one of them concerned sex. The key idea was “Who did you help?” not “Who did you sleep with?”
We shouldn’t abandon the word morality to the neo-Puritans. Letting the working poor get priced out of the health care system is immoral. Trumping up bogus charges about WMD and terrorism in order to start a war is immoral. The way we treat prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is immoral. We can’t be shy about using the language of morality. The Left is the true home of moral values, once you understand that morality is more than sex.
Al Sharpton, for one, gets this. On the November 28 Meet the Press he said:
Many of us have limited this argument to just sex-based arguments: gay marriage, abortion. ... I think that the broad issues of poverty, of disease, of health care -- those are moral issues, too. We’re not entering into a values discussion broadly enough.
Return to 10 Ideas for 2008 by Doug Muder