Why Should We Trust Them?

By Anthony Esolen The German episcopate appears all agog, not to say hot and lathery, to extend blessings to men who bed down with men, and women with women, apparently believing that Saint Paul and Saint Jude have nothing to teach them: Germany having led the way toward a world in which families are rich with children and stronger than ever; the love between man and woman is celebrated in song and confirmed in customs and laws; the popular culture is, in its most public manifestations, wholesome and clean; and what sleaze there is has to hide its rat's head in dirty alleys, ducking and dodging if not the law, then the reproach of all decent people. Is it so, reverend sirs? A commercial I saw the other day on German television, advertising a sexual prophylactic, featured two men snuggling in a bed, and a woman in black underwear, entering the room to have her fun with both of them at once. "Mit beiden?" read the caption, meant to entice, while a strain of canned music, featuring the female "vocal fry" that is now worldwide, as of a woman straining very hard to pass a bladder stone, celebrates the delight to come. I was dismayed, but not shocked. The last time I visited Germany, I saw what were intended as comic pornographic T-shirts on sale at a little town on the Rhine, in the open air, for the benefit of tourists and anybody else out on a warm September day. They featured cartoons of a talking phallus, cracking jokes. In the train, I picked up a glossy magazine for teenagers that somebody had left on the seat, and what I read in the advice column isn't repeatable here. In this regard, Italy – my ancestral home – was no better. It was fortunate for us that our children were too young to notice things. Want a postcard to send back to your family? Don't go to that big stand near the Tiburtine railway station in Rome, at least if your kids are past the first or second grade. For that matter, don't look at what's on offer at that nice family-owned hotel on the cliff overlooking Sorrento. We Americans have plenty of our own problems, of course, and pornography is a soul-devouring plague that has spread all over the world – almost. At least I can say that what is common in western Europe would shut you down if you tried to sell it in an American airport or train station, from what I can tell. Perhaps American television is sicker and fouler than I know. Many years ago, the retired tennis pro Bjorn Borg was enlisted to urge Swedes to do something about their cratering population. They put him on billboards, employing the Swedish word for the common English obscenity. Of course, now the English word is everywhere in the United States, on shirts, bumper stickers, and in the potty-mouths of students, teachers, and just about everybody else in public. Even more, as it seems to me, from women than from men, women who do not attain the traditional male virtues, but manage to pick up and flaunt the nastiest male vices. But I still cannot imagine it on a public billboard – unless the word is spray-painted on it by the petty criminals that some of our mayors do not bother to punish. The point is that no one in the western world, least of all western Europeans, have the slightest credibility when it comes to arguing that we should liberalize matters regarding sexual morality. In 1900, in the United States, even the poorest classes bore children within wedlock, more than 90 percent; that included blacks, poor farmers, factory workers, everybody – not high-class puritans. That is long past, but so also is the time when nations managed to replace themselves with children, because people understood that a man worked mainly, and sometimes exclusively, for the welfare of his wife and children. And that children were at the heart of all the good things in life, not a burden to be borne with, at best, some nice photographs and a good measure of stoic resignation, and at worst with resentment and contempt. We are out of our minds, and Europeans in...