What strikes me most powerfully about the defenders of the sexual revolution is their immovable abstraction. Always the matter is couched in terms of rights, or individual desires—what I want, what I may pursue. That this sexual laissez-faire destroys the common good, by undermining families and rotting whole neighborhoods from within, seems not to matter. Honest sociologists can give us the numbers, of children growing up without fathers or mothers, of the incidence of venereal diseases, of births out of wedlock, of delinquency and crime. I think instead of the people I have known.
I am thinking now of a cousin, whom I’ll call Danny. We were about the same age, but already, when he was a little boy, Danny was something of a bully. I’d see him pretty often, because we lived in the same town, and because the aunts and uncles used to visit our grandparents every Sunday afternoon. My main memory of Danny from those days is that he pushed me around, I didn’t like being with him, and, somehow, my father wished his son was more like Danny and less like me. I was bookish—not that we had any books in our house—and he was the typical boy, energetic and strong. One day my father and his father were roughhousing with us, throwing us up in the air, and I didn’t like it. Maybe I started crying, I don’t know. My father grouched about it, at which point my mother, not given to such outbursts, told him to stop it and to leave me alone. Looking back on it, I wish she hadn’t, but she meant well.
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