Morality Police

Much to my excitement, my blog received a critical post today in response to my attack on a bill that passed the House of Reps in Texas that would forbid high school cheerleaders from delivering sexy cheers. Among other things, I argued that such a thing should be regulated by individual schools and not the legislature. The respondent, I believe, says the lack of morality hurting kids these days makes such bills necessary.

Which got me thinking: who said there’s a lack of morality today? On a Website describing Measure of Moral Orientation for college-age kids, nothing related to hip shaking comes up. Instead, it focuses on tough questions like if your roommate has AIDS, do you deserve to know? But that’s not so much a scale for how much morality these students have, just the kind.

So we must look elsewhere, to the “F word” being said on the radio. Or to the fact that we’re seeing more and more journalists get publicly humiliated for inaccurate reporting (Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass being just two). Or that we’ve had back to back presidents who have lied (one about sex, one about WMDs), with a startling lack of public humiliation for the second.

But none of these truly tell us the moral state of our nation. For every publicized tale of immorality, there are hundreds of stories that go unmentioned about the guy who broke up a fight on a public street or the girl who visited a dying woman.

But I’m getting off topic. You see, it’s not the overall morality of the nation that is under attack most days. It’s the sexual morality parents worry about. We’ve got Nipplegate and MTV. Michael Jackson and Desperate Housewives. We’ve got the pregnant twice-married Britney Spears and gay marriage.

But we also have Jessica Simpson, who told fans that she was waiting until marriage to have sex. And we have musicians who don’t take off their clothes at halftime, men who don’t share beds with children, television stations like The Food Network and the incredibly popular Extreme Home Makeover.

Where does this leave parents, who want to raise kids with a moral compass? The same place they were before: making choices about what they watch, what movies they should see, what Internet sites they can visit.

If they believe their high school’s cheerleading is too lascivious, they should bring it up with the school board, not waste the time of the state representatives, who should be focusing on more important things like how Texas is below average for reading and science and at the average for writing. Only in math do students perform better than the national mean.