Malversation Goes Mainstream

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By now, if you haven't heard, we have wide-spread miscreant behavior when it comes to morality. From the teachers and students who send sexual text messages to each other to congressmen from New York who flirt inappropriately, it has now crossed a line for me. The President jokes about it, saying "If it was me, I'd resign." I'd never tweet around pictures of my private parts. That's a non-sequitor for me. Have these people no shame?

As a boy, I was taught to seek for and endorse the following principle:

A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones. Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. (Proverbs 12:4 and 31:10).

One night, when I was a teenager, at a dance, I pointed out to a good friend of mine that her bra was showing. She sheepishly tucked it back in and was forever grateful. A few years back, I complimented a young woman on how nice she looked and how I appreciated her modesty. We're Facebook friends now although we have never seen each other since. There was once a push for sexual purity, and now there are loads who pursue another path.

Some of them do not know any better. I knew a girl a year or so ago whose mother never stressed that and allowed misbehavior with her sister. I know another girl whose mother told her not to put out unless she got dinner. Put out? She shouldn't give up anything until and unless they are in a committed marriage relationship. In a book I've carried around with me for years, it reads this:

That man or youth who demands without marriage as the price of his favor or love the enjoyment of your body, has in fact nothing but sorrow and degradation to give you in return. That woman who offers to you her body outside wedlock invites you to a feast that brings disease and corruption that will pollute you until death. And any man or woman who demands as the price of his favor or friendship a surrender of any of your righteous standards of living, is offering you nothing worth buying. What it brings to you is false as Evil itself" (J. Reuben Clark, 1940, quoted in Principles of the Gospel, 1943).

Parents think they are good at keeping their children away from the obvious miscreants, but they are not teaching their children to value the men and women who are worth having. Good people will neither offer nor demand something of you that puts you at odds with yourself or asks you to part with something of value without so much as even a promissory note. Part of parenting means to teach your children how they ought to be. Since being moral begets correct actions, focus on their natures and values will manifest itself in their behaviors.

Anyone who knows anything at all about me knows what I value. I find it almost laughable, but mostly because it's so sad, when girls approach me and offer up things as if it will interest a person like myself. Such a notion to offer any sexual favors outside marriage is going to turn me off because it's completely inconsistent with my principles and with the principles that can lead to the best, happiest, and strongest family associations. Years ago, I read this in the book mentioned above:

How glorious is he who lives the chaste life. He walks unfearful in the full glare of the noon-day sun, for he is without moral infirmity. He can be reached by no shafts of base calumny, for his armor is without flaw. His virtue cannot be challenged by any just accuser, for he lives above reproach. His cheek is never blotched with shame, for he is without hidden sin. He is honored and respected by all mankind, for he is beyond their censure. He is loved by the Lord, for he stands without blemish. The exaltations of eternities await his coming (J. Reuben Clark, 1942).

A few years ago, a woman I really liked and briefly dated called me up out of the blue after a long radio silence. She had chosen another guy for reasons at which I can only speculate who was supposedly like me. They were still not married, and she told me she was pregnant. It was comforting to know that the child was not mine and that I was free from the social repurcussions and legal responsibilities that attend wanton misregard for the power of procreation.

We were taught to avoid sin or anything like unto it. Now, they are taught that since you only live once to live it up or that it's perfectly natural to give in to animal tendencies. That might be true if you want to be an animal, but we're better than that. We were born for glory.

I will go back to CS Lewis, because I love what he says on the subject better than I could write myself. C. S. Lewis wrote:

“When I was a youngster all the progressive people were saying, ‘Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all other impulses.’ I was simple-minded enough to believe them and what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. … it is like having a morality in which stealing fruit is considered wrong—unless you steal a nectarine. …” (A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby, Harcourt and Brace, pp. 193–4.)

Either you live morally, or you don't. The powers of procreation are a precious fruits to be enjoyed in the right time, the right way, for the right reason and by the right authority. Most of the other animal impulses only harm the individual animal and are not issues of morality. When you conceive a child, or go through the motions to create one, you accept a contractual obligation to that child. Why else would you rehearse if you didn't want a child? As Isaac Asimov's characters would ask, it sounds painful and messy. It certainly becomes messy when malversation goes mainstream.

We are not good enough to constantly withstand the clarion call to rationalize malversive behaviors. The line must be drawn here. If things are wrong, they are wrong. There are no half measures of morality. In addition to the predatory male, there is now the predatory female, but that has been true for longer than my entire life, and I have met a few of them. Rise up and be men who resist aberrant and abhorrant behaviors.

Men are not all the same. Men are not all pigs. I am living a moral life, and while I will not tell you it is easy, I know that it is possible. I hope with every energy I have that I will never be so weak as to 'sext' someone or transmit inappropriate photos. How did Joseph survive Potipher's wife? He got himself out. Mr. Miyagi warned Daniel that "best way avoid fight? Not be there", and my own martial arts instructor taught us that the best self-defense technique is to run. Wrote the poet: "All the water in the world, no matter how it tried, could never sink the smallest ship unless it got inside. And all the Evil in the world, the blackest kind of Sin, cannot hurt you the least bit, unless You let it in." May we be strong and resolute in our principles and values. May we set the right example to which good men may repair and rally for strength. May we be Men.