Is It Just Me Or Have We Misplaced Our Moral Compass?

When I got in the car Sunday, heading home to play with the dogs after an inspiring morning at church, I heard the last part of an interview with an author and her mother on the topic of sex toys. The daughter was asking Mom which ones she liked; I won’t go into details.

Then I checked the headlines when I got home. I saw that two former Auburn football players were dead because of an argument about a girl during a party at an apartment near the campus.

THEN, trying to find something to smile about, I turned on the news, and heard about an idiot who charged the cockpit door during a flight from North Carolina to California because flight attendants, sensing that he was drunk, refused to serve him another cocktail. I suppose he made their case.

To my Libertarian friends, I throw out the olive branch. I hate the TSA as much as you do. They waste our time, unless we’re terrorists; then for politically correct reasons we are ushered through as rapidly as we can kneel and offer the prayer of the hour.

My biggest problem with Libertarians is their naiveté on foreign policy. The notion that we can simply opt out of war is as preposterous as would be the notion that we can opt out of cancer. Neither is an option. But regular readers and listeners already know that about me.

My second biggest problem with Libertarians, though (and it’s a close second) is their amoral overreach. We don’t live in a vacuum; what we do affects others, which in turn affects commerce: Adam Smith, author of The Wealth Of Nations, was a moral philosopher, after all, before he codified capitalism.

A symbiotic relationship exists between virtue and prosperity. Neither will survive long without the other. The good news is, as with foreign policy and the economy, the administration has gone beyond societal norms on the social issues front, making them (social issues) legitimate and mainstream talking points—ones that, no doubt, will diminish the incumbent President.

Like the economy, in which the topic of deficits is routinely raised at dinner tables these days ( how bad is it if it gets that boring during a family meal?), and foreign policy, in which Syria is being talked about by more of us than usual, we’re all at least thinking about—and in many cases talking about-social issues. It’s a start in restoring the virtue necessary to ensure our prosperity, both of which are necessary for our safety. I have no doubt that President Obama’s cares about our safety, even as he hasn’t a clue how to keep us safe.