More to Morality than the Politics of Sex

From an interesting opinion piece by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal and OpinionJournal.com. After referencing notorious cheaters, liars, and miscreants like Barry Bonds, Andrew Fastow, Jack Abramoff, James Frey, etc., Henninger writes:

Politics killed ethical formation. Entire presidential campaigns and Supreme Court nominations are fought now over someone's idea of morality. What's right and wrong has become as red and blue as our politics. But look a little closer. These religious wars are about one thing: sex. After the 2004 "moral values" presidential election, Pew Research surveyed public attitudes. But the only explicitly identified determinants of moral belief named in their questionnaires are abortion, gay marriage and gay rights (and belief in God). Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, ignited a 33-year war over sex, bowdlerized for political discourse as "privacy." Pew collapses all moral life in America down to abortion and gay rights because the political class believes those issues move votes. And the result is that anything else important, like what Messrs. Bonds [Barry baseball cheat]or Fastow [Andrew, Enron cheat] represent, is ignored. Our political culture's preoccupation with sexual boundaries has smothered the more important ability of religious or ethical formation to function in the U.S. Currently the most rigorous whole-person moral system resides among evangelical right--at least in terms of keeping one's earthly life in perspective. But because the religious right has "positions" on abortion and homosexuality, politics seeks to undermine its entire function in the life of the nation. Inner-city parents desperate to use vouchers to send their children to values-forming parochial schools can't, because the reigning political calculus holds this would somehow "advantage" an abortion-resistant Catholic Church. Meanwhile the only values taught now in public schools are diversity, tolerance and respect for the environment. I'll bet Andrew Fastow and Barry Bonds believe in all that to the bottom of their souls. Let's admit the bitter irony of the unending sex wars. They've obliterated the ability to talk rationally in public about anything that smacks of "religion." Too political. Thus a modest proposal: Maybe it's time for the sex obsessives on the left and right to take their fights over abortion and gay rights into a corner somewhere and give the rest of society space to restore some ethical rootedness in an endlessly variable world. Because letting the vacuum persist long enough on values useful to everyday life will breed too many little Bonds and little Fastows. And because the constant public magnification of these ethical breakdowns makes everyone feel like scuzz by association. It has a corrosive affect on the rest of us, on our sense of who we are.

Of course abortion, for example, isn't simply an issue of sex..