You Have Sinned!

They tell us, for example, that it is immoral to go out for dinner when people in Africa are needy; they set up committees charged with designing speech codes for how precisely we should phrase an invitation for sex; they monitor the jokes that we tell so as to stamp out “hate speech”; they prescribe the right attitudes to cross-dressing, sex-change operations, and which bathrooms transgender people should be using. They have made it illegal to inquire about the age, marital status, drug use, or alcoholism of job applicants. They suspect child abuse if we spank our tantrum-prone child or hug our neighbor’s. We find ourselves censored if we use words such as “mankind,” “fireman,” or, when referring to God, “He.” Discrimination against blacks and women is (rightly) condemned, but discrimination in favor of blacks and women is praised. We are permitted to make fun of fundamentalist Christians, WASPs, and conservatives, but the sky will fall on us if we dare to laugh at the absurdities of deadly serious egalitarian moralizers. Attendance at sensitivity-training sessions has become mandatory for many teachers, police, civil servants, and blue-collar workers. At these sessions, ideologically reliable instructors tell their captive audience, as if they were children, how they should think, talk, and behave. Ideological indoctrination has become part of compulsory courses at universities and colleges, and more and more high schools as well.

Read all of John Kekes at City Journal on "The Menace of Moralism."