Judeo-Christian values and traditional norms promoting integration of love-sex-marriage, modesty, and self-restraint are disappearing with the happy support of school administrations, the psychological counseling establishment, the government, and the legal system that allows erotic love to trump agape, or selfless love.  Schools in NYC and elsewhere may not lead students in prayer, but they are allowed to lead students into paths of sexual expression such as ten-minute counseling before sending them for an abortion, lessons on how to put a condom on a cucumber or a banana, and the need to prevent STDs rather than uphold the sex, marriage, and love unity.

Divorce has skyrocketed during the post-WWII years; sexually transmitted disease has become rampant; cohabitation is becoming more popular with each passing year; the porno industry has captured the time, money, and imaginations of tens of millions of men on the internet; and there is a gossip feeding frenzy regarding the immoral habits of celebrities.  Pedophilia is being publicly defended as a legitimate activity, and being HIV-positive is something, according to signs on NYC subways, that can be handled by partnering with one's doctor and various city agencies.

In fact, this writer's jaw dropped while waiting for a New York City subway one morning a couple of weeks ago as I saw a large poster adorning the wall of the station showing four smiling, lovely young African-American women announcing a new PrEP medication that would help the users (in this case, presumably, women) not to become HIV-positive by contracting that virus from a bed partner. 

This writer learned that the poster that shocked me is one of several different posters promoting the use of a new medication, Truvada, along with condoms, to prevent becoming infected by a partner who already has contracted that virus.  The tagline for the ads is "Play Sure," which is a play on the word "pleasure."  Yes, pleasure is as important in this public health equation as safety.  According to Demetre Daskalakis, an assistant commissioner of the Department of Health's Bureau of HIS/AIDS, this program nicknamed PrEP is "a way of pushing the idea that safe sex leads to more pleasurable sex."

Today, young people have hook-ups.  They are like fish that get hooked.  Sixty and seventy years ago, it was considered romantic and borderline scandalous to have a couple of kisses and then have romantic fantasies of a life together with the other with the special lips that were the objects of one's attention.  Here is a verse from a song from that ancient era by Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong: "You'll never know how many dreams I've dreamed about you / Or just how empty they all seemed without you / So kiss me once, then kiss me twice / Then kiss me once again / It's been a long, long time."

Today, Satchmo's words are considered by millions to be silly, innocent, innocuous, infantile, and unsophisticated.  Yes.  How can any exciting kiss compare with the high-intensity pleasure of a hook-up?  We are turning out millions upon millions of sex-crazed amoral and immoral people, people burning with lust day and night, who think nothing could be more normal.  The "new normal" has replaced the "old morality" for vast numbers of people.  After writing an article in which I referred to our "sick and sinful society," one of my colleagues, a brilliant and sociable scientist, came to my office to tell me she resented my use of the word "sin."  "There is no such thing as sin," she said.  I then asked, "What about having sex with animals?"  Her answer: "Different strokes for different folks."

For many people, as evidenced by the behavior patterns in our society for the past few decades, the word "morality" is no longer meaningful and is deemed as irrelevant as the word "sin" was for my learned colleague.  It is a term used by antiquarians to refer to the mores and ideas of some perceived distant past before the knowledge revolution revealed to a hungry world that any and every form of behavior is normal and right, although the practical need for social order means that certain behaviors need to be controlled and deemed unlawful.

The world of psychology, in its post-Freudian manifestation, believes that it has released the population from its Victorian-era repressions.  According to far too many psychologists who desire to drive guilt for non-marital and extra-marital sex out of their clients' psyches, the traditional repressions and unconscious desires were driving the world into untold neuroses even as late as the 1960s.  Many educated post-Freudians thus consider it better to express one's libidinous self than to dwell in a puritanical world controlled by the rigid rules of the superego, which they then call "God-given morality."  The new, enlightened mindset says balderdash to ancient works like the Holy Bible, both Old and New Testaments.  Even the distinction between responsible freedom and license is blurred in the minds and behavior of millions of individuals operating at all intellectual levels. 

Of all the horrible amoral and immoral trends, the most striking, in addition to the rejection of over 60 million aborted children, is also the rejection of fatherhood on a vast scale.  The goal of erotic pleasure as an end in itself has usurped the desire to perpetuate the human race in its familial bonds.  Why can't we see that these two trend lines – taking of the lives of the unborn and at the same time giving birth to vast numbers of infants outside the love-marriage-sex unity – are phenomena that feed and promote each other?  This is a twofold rejection of the underpinnings of family life that has reached epidemic proportions. 

In 1960, the proportion of births to unmarried women was just 5%, but since 2009, the percentage has been about 40%.  In 2013, 72 percent of all births to black women, 66 percent to American Indian or Alaskan native women, and 53 percent to Hispanic women occurred outside marriage, compared with 29 percent for white women and 17 percent for Asian or Pacific Islander women.  Although articles tell us there has been a leveling off of births outside marriage, the figures should alarm anyone who loves the idea of family and desires a stable society.

With 40% of the people of the United States being born outside of marriage, increasingly, the Fourth of the Ten Commandments is being abrogated.  It is being replaced with "Honor Your Mother" or "Honor Your Role Model and Your Mother."  The fathers are vanishing from the parenting equation as the intact family is disintegrating.  Respect and love for the unborn and respect and love for fatherhood continue to erode in our erotic culture.