AT LAST - CONCUPISCENCE EXPOSED

It is most sobering to contemplate the crooked conditions of our time. The planet is permeated with scourges and plagues: war and crime, fear and famine, poverty, pestilence, and pollution. The very cement of our system, the fabric of our cosmos is crumbling into dismal corruption and decay. Some may aver these ills to be as old as written words. I concur. However, it is also valid, and I believe few would disagree with me on this point, that what we see in this century - the simultaneous degeneration of every stone in the foundation of human co-operation - is a sign of singular portent.

No remedy may be rendered until first we reason out the root of this ruin. No solution is possible without our precise perception of the problem. Clearly, the fundamental fault must be found in the fecklessness of man's nature. Could it be otherwise? Perhaps it would be presumptuous to proclaim, as did one prominent preacher, that "sin is the moral cause of earthquakes."* Nevertheless, even disease, where the agent of evil is non-human, is frequently exacerbated by man's unsanitary, imprudent, and irresponsible habits.

Therefore, the cause we seek is none other than the answer to this question: What one flaw is universal, what factor ubiquitous, what characteristic uppermost in the world family? I conceive but one: Concupiscence. My friends, concupiscence, once confined to the carbuncles of civilization, now creeps as a cancer in colleges, corporations, congresses, churches, and - kitchens - yes, in every corner of our country. No longer may citizens stroll through any scene, whether secular or sacred, without being scandalized by the sickening seditionists of smut.

This fact now seems most pertinent: Paraphilias, once private, have now passed to the point of poisoning our public lives, luring us with lasciviousness, assailing us with aberrations, their menacing teeth masticating our most sacred, our most sacrosanct civil virtues. This stain has seeped; I say this sin has slithered into every seam of our society. No segment is safe.

In schools, our children's future is tossed to tumescent teachers of erotic erudition, recondite ribaldry, and scurrilous scholarship. On television, the shocking shamanism of the electric church has increased the negative charge against a medium already known for its nefarious inclinations.

And what of those wanton works within our houses of worship? Evasive evangelists pad their pockets with profits from their pusillanimous pabulum, openly promoting peccancy as mendacious ministers of masturbation. Hear their locutions of lubricity, their hypocritical hyperbole of hyperphilia. What was once deplorable is now deemed divine.

Gaze, if you will, at our gallinaceous governors, the gutless guardians of public good. Listen as they gabble their litany of licentiousness in the libertine legislatures of our libidinous land. Nearsighted nabobs, they nitpick and natter over the dissolute dissertations, incoherent idiocy and liberal laws of lust which become the leprosy of our lives. And, let us not ignore the insidious indecency of the internet. In a single decade of disgusting moral decadence, it has sneaked scandalously into the central showcase of soul debasing sin.

Who provoked these perverted psychosexual pernicities? Some say the salacious scoundrels are the so-called sages of sexuality, seeding scatology while safely shielded by their sanctimonious screen of self-satisfaction. A few feel the pharisaical freemartins of feminism have fostered the folly of fornication behind their fanatical facade of freedom. Many believe the baleful barristers of backroom bedlam, the Bolsheviks of ballyhoo, the Baals of the bacchanalia, are but base bigots of barbarity and bondage. I infer that intemperate infidels of iniquity have incited the ideology of immorality in an insatiable inquisition of indiscretion and infamy. Thus, it's no longer great to be square or straight.

And yet, like an iceberg, the worst is what we do not see: yes, covert concupiscence; debased desires undemonstrated, hence denied. The very animalistic desires we claim to abhor are savored in secret. No diversion is too devious for those facing the heartbreak of satyriasis or the nemesis of nymphomania. In truly human form we embrace our own fallacious philosophies of filth, our own esoteric effluents, while piously persecuting those of others. We whip in public what we welcome in private.

Is there a person not a prisoner of pornographic passion, not indebted to incontinence? Let him leap forward and lead; let him step up for our salvation.

It is as I had both suspected and feared. No one is there.
A famous historian once said, "Who of us would have a future if his past were known."# Indeed.


* John Wesley, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
# Will Durant