How do we decide what behavior is OK and what actions deserve our disapproval?
In the 60 years I have been roaming this planet, our ways of setting moral and ethical standards have evolved through a series of interesting mutations.
“Don’t leave those cards out on your desk,” Mom cautioned us kids one morning. “Put them in the bottom drawer for now. Grand-mother is coming.”
My grandmother had some rather stern, old-fashioned ideas about the evils connected to the pasteboards used by professional gamblers. When she was around, her ethical standards ruled the roost. Nobody shuffled the cards. Not even for an innocent game of hearts.
When my grandmother passed on in an untimely fashion, her role as moral monitor of our house gave way to the standard observed in parsonages across the land: “What would the brethren think?”
My first crop of siblings and I missed all the good movies in our pre-teen days because “the brethren” back then thought picture shows were Satan’s tool to corrupt our young souls. Thus the church dictated our behavior.
But there arose a generation who angrily screamed, “God is dead,” and “Down with the establishment.” Church was part of the Establishment, of course, so at least for that decade God and “the brethren” lost their vote when moral matters needed to be sorted out.
“It’s O.K. if nobody knows you’re doing it,” was the motto of the Spiro Agnew/Richard Nixon era. Along with a lot of their chagrined contemporaries they learned that (1) some secrets can’t be kept and (2) you can thoroughly disgrace yourself when your less-than-noble deeds become headlines. These guys seemed to be surprised that outside the White House and top corporate offices, basic long-time moral values prevailed in the land.
“Whether the President has sex of whatever sort is his own private business,” some media luminaries keep trying to convince us today.
“Besides that,” the major net-work news people tell us nightly, “Mr. Clinton’s approval ratings in the polls are at an all-time high,” implying that this somehow makes his lies and his marital infidelity OK.
To those of us who would base moral principles on either Grandma’s opinion or political polls, I recommend instead the Scripture that says, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”
Nothing else matters.