Tonight I thought I would address a subject to which I bring impeccable credentials: the contemporary scandal that is conventional morality.
I speak, of course, with the full diminished authority of a white American male. More than that, a middle-aged, middle-class white male, adhering to the stereotype in almost all particulars: a married, suburban dad with three children and a dog. On Sundays, we go to church. When it comes to dress, my wife and I are not the Taliban. But I confess that our attraction for the Amish grows each May, when we begin the grim arguments with our daughters over what bathing suits they will wear that summer.
There was a day, not far in our past, when a conventional fellow such as myself could raise his children not only by his own authority but with full trust in the whole communal apparatus of convention: the schoolteacher, the town cop, the softball coach, the next-door neighbor, the pastor, and so on. Together these are the authorities that make up the little platoons which define our lived lives
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