Back in the olden days, when I was in junior high school, I got a subscription to Sports Illustrated—a luxury afforded me by my mom’s remarriage. Prior to that, there had been no money in the frivolous expenditures fund, but wealth has a way of introducing new temptations. I’m speaking, of course, about the swimsuit issue. All the way through high school, it would confront me with a moral dilemma each and every February. By way of context, I had been baptized into the faith on April Fool’s Day, 1990, and I was committed. I was also a hormone-laced teenage boy. Though my mom didn’t restrict my access to SI’s famed swimsuit issue, my own moral compass was something of a tyrant. I was fairly convinced I had to get rid of it, but that was easier said than done. As soon as I would pull it from the mailbox, the reasons for not disposing of it came flooding in. I would stand with it hovering over the garbage can like Frodo overlooking the fires of Mordor. My precious!

In the pre-internet world of my youth, pictures of beautiful women in revealing swimsuits were almost sacred for their scarcity. Social media has made the swimsuit issue quaint and superfluous by comparison, but back then it was worth its weight in gold. When my dad—who was far less puritanical than I was—got wind that I’d simply thrown that first issue away, he graciously offered to take them off my hands in future. He was always looking out for me. I think I did give him a few issues over the years, but that was just kicking the can down the road. Maybe that’s why I did it. Knowing I’d be facing off against them again every time I stayed at his apartment.

Following its publication each year, SI’s letters to the editor section would be full of correspondence alternately praising or condemning the swimsuit issue. Some contended that its “celebration” of strong, beautiful women served the public good. Others insisted that it merely commodified them for something that had nothing to do with athletic achievement. But I distinctly remember one letter in which a woman wrote in to say she’d be worried about her husband and sons if they didn’t look at the swimsuit issue. In hindsight, she may have been on to something—at least as it relates to her sons. Lust is unequivocally sinful for the married man. It’s more complicated when it comes to unwed sons. And sometimes the devil we know is better than the one we don’t.

For all the people who wrote in to complain that the swimsuit issue was too risqué, I wonder how they would have reacted to the knowledge that one day Sports Illustrated would swap out their lust-inducing models for women who were too corpulent to excite anything but antipathy in the mind of your average 13-year-old. How easily I could have dropped those issues into the bin. Would the magazine’s then-detractors have considered this move away from sex appeal a net gain? Progress on behalf of the fairer sex? Or did SI actually land on something more offensive? Instead of doing away with the swimsuit issue, they did away with its only virtue. A society that makes an idol out of beauty is better off than one making an idol out of "body positivity." Idolatry is a sin either way, but the first gives homage to God’s ideal. The second gives homage to upending it. How many of those who wagged their fingers at the magazine in the 80’s and 90’s would now take as many Elle Macpherson and Kathy Ireland pinups as the publishers would deign to give us—if they’d just ditch their grotesque nod to inclusivity?

We saw something of the same cultural inversion in the disparate reactions to Sydney Sweeney’s ballyhooed American Eagle ads. There was a time, of course, when the religious right would have taken umbrage at provocative pictures of a buxom blonde being plastered all over our public spaces. But now that same demographic is mostly cheering on the return of the American sex symbol. If the only alternative is seeing advertisements full of unseemly women or “women” who aren’t women at all, we’ll take the Sydney Sweeney pictures, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the left’s condemnation of the campaign is not because the ads are too sexy, but because Sydney Sweeney is too pretty, too blonde, and too white. They consider it inherently racist to suggest that a white woman could have “great genes,” leaving conservatives in the awkward position of having to defend the ads as a sort of civic duty. These are strange times, indeed, Mr. Crow.

The reason beautiful women have become such a problem for the left is because beauty itself has become a problem. It is not diverse. It is not equitable, and it is certainly not inclusive. Though all races produce beautiful women, not all women are beautiful. The standard is too unyielding. Nor do progressives like the notion of being judged by a measure not of their own making—an external authority that does not smile equally upon all things. It may sound noble to pretend that everyone and everything is equally beautiful, but that is mere moral subversion. It mirrors the sinister designs of Syndrome—Pixar’s unlikely villain in The Incredibles—who recognized that when everyone is super (or special, or beautiful), then no one is. You cannot broaden the definition of beauty without destroying beauty any more than you can broaden the definition of marriage without destroying marriage.

The fact of the matter is this. Beauty is exceedingly unfair. The same goes for intelligence and athleticism. Even if you engage in all manner of social tinkering to try and mitigate the advantages bestowed by wealth, education, or simply growing up with a mom and a dad, there is nothing you can do to mitigate the advantages of being extraordinarily beautiful, intelligent, or athletic. Believe me, I know! (that’s a joke, by the way) You can put plain or overweight women on the cover of fashion magazines and call it progress, but you’re not actually leveling the playing field. You’re engaging in a sort of sophistry that can only be maintained by vigilantly coercing the populace into parroting the party line. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not casting stones at the overweight. I’ve been trying to lose the same 20 pounds for more than 20 years. I understand the struggle. I'm casting stones at the cultural celebration of being overweight. That's where the subversion lies.

If there were a case to be made for the swimsuit issues of my youth, it would go like this. There is value in recognizing physical beauty. There is value in pedestaling the ideal. And unlike a Playboy, the swimsuit issue never showed you all the way behind the curtain. It preserved the essential mystery. That doesn’t mean I’d give my 13-year-old a copy. But neither would I be overly distraught if I found him with one. Trying to prevent adolescent boys from ever seeing women that might prompt in them lustful desires is a fool’s errand. And may do them more harm in the end. Andrew Klavan points out that it is “the erotic impulse that draws men to women.” And that’s a good thing. The swimsuit issue didn’t create our collective obsession with the female body; it is a reflection of that obsession. Klavan frequently asserts that women's bodies are thought about more often than anything else in the universe. Men and women alike obsess over the female body.

One of the greatest challenges in being a parent is knowing which temptations to remove and which temptations to let stand. Because if we shield our children from everything that might lead them astray, what will happen to them when our protections are no longer in place? How will they fare when a sea of never-before-encountered enticements suddenly floods in upon them? I understand the argument that it is unhealthy to hold up such “impossible” beauty standards, aided as they are by the world’s best photographers, makeup artists, and photo editors, and the globe’s most scenic locations. I understand that most young men will never date a supermodel, and most young women will never have the face and figure to be one. But there is something to be said for impossible ideals. Because all of us can become more beautiful than we are. All of us can become more intelligent than we are, and all of us can become more competent than we are. If we’ll put in the work, that is. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. How’s that for an impossible standard? But Jesus himself held it out in Matthew 5. Will any of us actually obtain perfection? No. Should we strive to get as close as we can? Absolutely.

For going on a generation, our culture has been awash in a very subversive message. It goes like this: You’re fine just the way you are. Don’t bother trying to improve your body. You can be beautiful at any size. Who cares about improving your mind? The internet will tell you what you need to know. And don’t worry about improving your soul. God is already crazy about you—because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough and doggone it, people like you! That was satire 35 years ago. Today it’s gospel, but the swimsuit issue of my youth conveyed a very different message. It emphatically said to both sexes alike, you’re not good enough the way you are. Not by a long shot. We can argue as to whether the delivery mechanism was necessary or appropriate, but its practical impact was pretty straightforward. To young men, it said: aspire to a woman like this. To young women it said, aspire to be a woman like this. Is that shallow? Of course, if that’s all you’re aiming for. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain. Worse still, a beautiful woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig’s snout. But do you know what’s better than a woman with discretion? A beautiful woman with discretion. That’s a woman worth being, and worth having. That’s the kind of woman who will bring the best out of a man, which is a win for everyone.

The danger of the swimsuit issue in its heyday is largely as I’ve already laid out. Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. But adultery, it’s worth noting, is a narrow sexual sin. It only applies to the married. I’ve often wondered why it is that adultery is forbidden in the Ten Commandments while fornication is not. If you were to include only one, wouldn’t fornication be the more obvious choice? It’s the broader of the two. And while fornication encompasses adultery; adultery does not encompass fornication. Its inclusion in the Ten Commandments, then, is good indication that God views adultery as the more serious offense. But why? In light of what God said in the first two chapters of Genesis, that it is not good for a man to be alone, that a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife, and that they should be fruitful and multiply, it’s fair to conclude that marriage and childbearing are pretty high on God’s priority list. With that in mind, the harsher sentencing for adultery is easier to understand. The “penalty” for fornication in the Pentateuch was marriage. And until very recently, premarital sex that led to pregnancy routinely did result in marriage. Fornication, though sinful, can still result in a positive good. Adultery cannot. Fornication may lead to marriage; adultery only destroys it.

When Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount that lust is akin to adultery, he implies that lust too is more serious when it involves a married man. I suspect this is because it is difficult to make a clean distinction between lusting after a woman and falling in love with her (though, it seems safe to assume that if you’re pining over a woman you’ve never met or seen in person, it’s probably not love). Lust, by definition, is intense sexual desire, but let us not pretend that love is devoid of such fleshly considerations. We might argue that lust has no concern for the character of the woman or the good of the woman, but we can’t say that falling in love has nothing to do with sexual desire. You can sleep with a woman without being in love with her. I’m not sure you can fall in love with a woman without wanting to sleep with her. Though my wife and I did not consummate our relationship until our wedding night, that was a primary objective from almost the first moment I saw her. I wanted to get her into bed, and so I married her—thirteen months later. Sexual desire wasn’t the only reason I married her, but it was up there. Was that lustful of me? Perhaps, but for the unmarried, it is difficult to draw the line between illicit sexual desire and healthy sexual ambition. The sex drive was installed by our maker, after all. It’s not as if we can shut it off. Nor should we. It’s there for a reason. To love a woman is to care about more than just her body, but it is not to care about less.

Lust in a single man may push him to marriage, but lust in a married man is adultery in principle and may lead to actual adultery in practice. That’s why the danger is so much greater for the married man. It's also true that unmarried adults were almost an unknown in Christ’s day, which may be another reason why Jesus focuses on lust in the context of marriage. When I was single, I naively thought that lust would be a non-factor after marriage. Silly me. Because while it’s true that a naked wife trumps a picture of a swimsuit model any day of the week—or a Playboy for that matter, the devil is nothing if not relentless. His legions do everything in their power to prevent the coming together of naked husbands and naked wives. If this weren’t the case, Christ would have had no need to warn husbands against looking at other women for sexual fulfillment. Since this is the case, he did. Husbands are forbidden from lusting after other women. Single men are forbidden from lusting after other men’s wives.

For most of human history, you couldn’t gaze at a beautiful woman continuously or privately, unless you were in an intimate relationship with her. You certainly couldn’t stare at her ad nauseam. You were at the mercy of time and place. Then came the photograph, followed by mass reproductions of the photograph, and finally, the digital photograph—distributed instantly across the globe. Now you can see, not just the most beautiful women in your own community, but the most beautiful women in the world. And you can carry them around in your pocket. Technology has made it possible to lust after a woman, not by looking at her, but by looking at a reproduction of her. A reproduction you can possess without having to woo. 

I don’t want to suggest that unchecked lust poses no threat to the single man because lust can rapidly move single and married men alike up the ladder of sin. Vices, left unchecked, always move us from bad to worse. In my annual showdowns against the swimsuit issue, I was protected against climbing the ladder of sin, in part, by a significant limitation. In 1990, there was no easy or private means for the average minor to obtain pornography. That is no longer the case today, which means the stakes are even higher. And since sin is never satisfied, if you linger too long over images of women in swimsuits, you’ll eventually be urged on to images of women without their swimsuits, until even that is not enough. Satan’s endgame, as I’ve said before, is not just to pervert sex. It’s to destroy sex, until we no longer have any appetite left for the real body of a real spouse. That’s why, if I had to choose between a son who was sleeping with his girlfriend or a son who was addicted to pornography, it would be a fairly easy call. Both are sinful, but one is far more subversive. Along the same lines, would you be more disturbed to find out your teenaged daughter had slept with her boyfriend or that your teenaged daughter had an abortion? For me, it’s not even close. These are not moral equivalents. They’re categorically different. And yet there are “Christian” parents across the country, pastors included, who would sooner sacrifice their grandchildren than endure the shame of a daughter’s immorality. Such behavior is truly monstrous. Sex is a positive good that only becomes sinful when it is engaged in unlawfully. But abortion is only and always evil. No matter what James Talarico says.

Frederica Mathewes-Green has something like 800 essays to her name, but don’t let that hyphenated last name fool you. She doesn’t write the kinds of things you might expect from someone with a double-barrelled surname. She is married to an orthodox priest, and their son is an orthodox priest. But at the time she got married, now more than 50 years ago, “the woman’s liberation movement [was] very important to [her].” She announced as much to her future husband on their very first date, and when they eventually wed, both legally changed their last name to Mathewes-Green. Which is to say, a lot can change in 50 years. Mathewes-Green was once the president of Feminists for Life, but she officially excised the feminist label in 1994. Ten years later she would concede that “no matter how romantic it sounds, a hyphenated name will only give you headaches.” All of their adult children would wind up opting for a single surname. It’s just easier.

The reason I bring her up, in addition to being a fan of her writing, is because of an article she wrote for National Review back in 2002. The title was, “Let’s Have More Teen Pregnancy.” How’s that for a feminist mantra? She pitched it first to an editor at the New York Times, but as her article would lay out, teen pregnancy is one of those rare “vices” that virtually everyone is opposed to. “Despite the conflict between liberals and conservatives on nearly every topic available,” she wrote, “this is one point on which they firmly agree: Young people absolutely must not have children.” Liberals and conservatives disagree on means, she pointed out, the former advocating for birth control, the latter for abstinence, but they have shaken hands on the notion that “the younger generation must not produce a younger generation.” Kudos to National Review for running the piece, and kudos to Frederica for being so ahead of her time. She was able to see the problem way before the rest of us.

In our noble efforts to keep young people from purportedly destroying their lives by having children, we little imagined the day was coming when women of all ages would stop having children. Turns out, that shouldn’t have surprised us. We’ve long known that a woman’s fertility begins to wane at 25, so delaying pregnancy often amounts to foregoing pregnancy in the end. Why would society suddenly insist that women put off having kids, particularly in light of the added protections it provides them against breast cancer? That is why, according to Frederica. The “population-control crowd promotes delayed childbearing” because they’d just assume women not bear children at all. Here is her one-paragraph case for the practical benefits of parenting young:

Younger moms and dads are likely to be more nimble at child-rearing…, less apt to be exhausted by toddlers’ perpetual motion, (and) less creaky-in-the-joints when it’s time to swing from the monkey bars. I suspect that younger parents will also be more patient with boys-will-be-boys rambunction, and less likely than weary 40-somethings to beg pediatricians for drugs to control supposed pathology. Humans are designed to reproduce in their teens, and they’re potentially very good at it. That’s why they want to so much.

My wife was 22 when our son was born. I was 26. Our daughter came just over a year later. So we were young parents the first time around. Now we’re older parents. I’m 50, and our youngest just turned 13. Having experienced it from both ends of the spectrum, I can say that Frederica was right. Maybe I have more wisdom now, but I definitely had more energy and patience when I was younger. Our youngest, I often fear, is getting short shrift. Some of it is him; a lot of it is us. More importantly, how is it reasonable to simultaneously demand that young people wait until they’re married to have sex and also wait until they’re older to get married? Practically speaking, you can only choose one. Culturally, we’ve chosen the latter—assuming it will lead to better marital outcomes. Statistically, it doesn’t. In the words of Mathewes-Green:

During the last half of the 20th century, as brides’ age rose from 20 to 25, the divorce rate doubled. The trend toward older, and presumptively more mature, couples didn’t result in stronger marriages. Marital durability has more to do with the expectations and support of surrounding society than with the partners’ age.

The prolonged childhood we now offer our kids, along with the cultural insistence that they serially date and cohabitate as young adults, is not training people to be better spouses, she argued. It’s training them for divorce. Part of the issue is that we misdiagnosed the problem. It’s not teen pregnancy that’s the problem. It’s unmarried teen pregnancy. The historic norm is to marry young, but we now call it folly to wed right out of high school. That’s because we’ve mostly done away with vocational training and tried to push everyone into higher education where they’ll likely amass crippling amounts of debt and wind up, if they survive, with a degree that has never had less practical value. If we simply “restore(d) an environment that supports younger marriage,” Frederica argued, “[people] won’t have to fight biology for a decade or more.”

Teen pregnancy is the bogeyman that gets trotted out every time the dubious ethics of abortion are questioned. Do you want your 14-year-old daughter to be forced to carry a rapist’s baby?! That’s the typical framing. Never mind the fact that girls under 15 account for one-fifth of one percent of all U.S. abortions. Or that teens in general account for only 8.5%. If you were to ask those who justify abortion by appealing to teen pregnancy whether they think abortion should only be legal for teenage rape victims, you’ll soon learn that, no, they want abortion to be legal for all women, in all circumstances. Their fiendish premise has nothing to do with their actual position. It just makes it seem less damnable. Though we don’t know how many babies were aborted in America last year, Guttmacher puts the total at 1,129,900. If that were the case, then teen mothers procured somewhere around 96,000 abortions in 2025. Mothers in their 20’s added another 638,000, and mothers in their 30’s chipped in with 354,000 more. In other words, teen pregnancy isn’t the problem. Unwed pregnancy is the problem, almost exclusively. Broadly speaking, married couples do not have abortions.

Unwed pregnancy, in the days before contraception and abortion, wasn’t anywhere near the problem it is today. Let that sink in. Since the mainstreaming of birth control and abortion, we’ve gone from children being born in wedlock, to children being born out of wedlock, to children not being born at all. When I first started this work, I thought preventing abortion was my primary objective. That’s part of it, to be sure, but it misses the bigger picture. Because if we were to do away with abortion by simply doing away with pregnancy, it would be a hollow victory in the end. We’d have avoided the bloodguilt of abortion, but we would not have heeded God’s founding mandate or discharged our duty to the next generation. Be fruitful and multiply was God’s directive in Genesis one. It wasn’t, Don’t have an abortion. Abortion is wrong because it’s murder. It kills an innocent and helpless human being. Not conceiving children at all is better than conceiving children and killing them, but the avoidance of abortion is not our final aim. We’re not just anti-abortion; we’re pro-life. And we won’t solve the problem of abortion through abstinence or contraception. It’s going to take marriage and righteousness.

Several weeks ago, on the recommendation of a friend from Down Under, I read for the first time A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. Before I’d even finished, I ordered a copy for my wife, copies for my older children, and a copy for my pastor—who isn’t much older than they are. That’s how much it affected me. I couldn’t shake the conviction that if I’d only read this book before I’d gotten married, I might have been a better husband. I might have more vigilantly guarded against the ruthless in creep of “ministry” and spared my wife all sorts of heartache along the way. Vanauken (Van) and his young bride (Davy) were not believers when they wed, but they had what I would call an abundance of holy ambition. They went to great lengths to ensure that nothing be allowed to break in and diminish their love for each other, and no pursuit of earthly treasure would derail their commitment to live an extraordinary life. And they were faithful to that vision, until God took it from them.

Without going into too much detail, Van and Davy eventually came to faith through the influence of Christian friends and the writings of C.S. Lewis. Nothing unusual there. Countless others have come to Christ in just the same way, but what is unusual about their story is that after reading all the Lewis they could get their hands on, they became friends with the man himself. Can you imagine?! They were Americans but had wound up at Oxford via Pearl Harbor and Yale. Van and Lewis would go on to exchange letters for the next decade, until Lewis’ death in 1963. Many of them are included in the book. Lewis would say of Van and his wife that he never liked two young people more, and yet following Davy’s tragic death just 15 years into their marriage, Lewis gently rebuked Van for something he saw as a grave mistake. Namely, their decision not to have children. Though Lewis was a bachelor nearly his whole life and never had children himself, he felt strongly that the Vanaukens had chosen badly. He wrote:

There's no other man, in such affliction as yours, to whom I'd dare write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love for you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared [your wife] very wrongly the pains of childbirth. Do not evade your own, the travail you must undergo while Christ is being born in you… One flesh must not and in the long run cannot 'live to itself' any more than the single individual. [Marriage] was not made, any more than [the single man], to be its Own End. It was made for God and (in Him) for its neighbours—first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g. maternity, which cannot be shared should on that account be avoided, is surely very unsound. For A) (forgive me) the conjugal act itself depends on opposite, reciprocal and therefore unshare-able experiences. Did you want her to feel she had a woman in bed with her? B) The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not & could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different, trivial in comparison.

The decision to not have children had been made before Van and Davy were married and before they bowed the knee to Christ. But it was never rescinded. They went on believing that a child would weaken the strength of their devotion to each other—not considering, perhaps, that redemption came to Eve, and to us all, through nothing less than the bearing of children. For unto us a child is born. Van and Davy had further committed, as Lewis alluded, to foregoing any experience that couldn’t be shared on equal terms by both of them. What Lewis pointed out is that individuals and married couples alike have a responsibility to neighbor that cannot be ignored. There was something beautiful about the Vanauken’s calculated devotion to each other, but it also contained the seeds of its own demise. That’s because young love cannot be maintained. It must grow into something bigger, or die. More often than not, it’s the latter. This is how Lewis put it:

I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in which men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth.

Years later, Van would concede that their decision had been “wrongheaded” and believes in time they would have seen that. “There is reason to suppose,” he would write, “that our choosing to have no children might have changed, but two years after we came down from Oxford, where our Christ had found us, she was dead, and I was learning the meaning of grief.” Van would then go on to make a rather surprising revelation—one I suspect C.S. Lewis never knew about. When Davy was just 14 years old, long before she met Van, she was impregnated by a person unknown. She gave birth to a blue-eyed girl she called Marion and reluctantly placed her for adoption. Decades later, Van would finally find that daughter living in San Francisco—a joyous discovery he would recount for the New Oxford Review. He then wondered what might have become of Davy’s daughter and Davy’s grandchildren had abortion been available to her all those years ago. He wrote:

Had the frightened young girl who was Davy lived in this decade instead of that re­mote one, she would perhaps (as maybe Davy did) have first confided in some girlfriend, who (instead of perhaps urging her to confide in her mother) would have urged her to see the school counselor. And the sympathetic counselor, without precisely recommending it, would have told her of the possibility of a quick and easy abortion. Nothing to be afraid of, and then she would never have to confess her dreadful secret to her mother... It wouldn’t have occurred to her that her mother, like God, loved her, even if she, again like God, was sometimes stern… And it would never occur to her, in that desperate, scared moment, that she might in future years feel a haunting grief and guilt for the baby she would have destroyed… If [Davy] had had an abortion, either she would at best have felt that guilt and grief, or she would have defiantly so hardened her heart against such feelings that her very per­sonality would have been altered, toughened. How that might have affected our love — if indeed we should have loved — I cannot know. But, however that might have been, the frightened young girl did not, thank God, have that option.

Van would continue:

What existed in Davy’s belly was not just a growth of tissue but a unique human life: Marion. No other. This is not a religious posi­tion; it is a biological fact that the genetic character or individuality is established at the instant of conception... If she had been destroyed by abortion, there never would have been, never could have been (even if Davy had had a score of other children) a Marion… She was uniquely Marion nine years after birth but uniquely Marion nine seconds after conception also. And to kill her at either point would be to kill that particular, individual, unique, never-to-be-duplicated human life… I know Marion now and love her, and I should be diminished if half a cen­tury ago Davy had clutched at the straw of abortion. And all the folk who have touched or shall touch the lives of Marion and her children and their children-to-be would be diminished… You who read this essay would not be reading it if Marion had died in the womb, for I should not be writing it — though we should never have known. Yet if we, somehow, would have been diminished by just this one abortion half a century ago, had it happened, what of the [millions of] abor­tions since the Supreme Court’s precisely fatal decision? It seems to me that [even] one abortion [leaves] a hole in Creation.

King Solomon declared in Psalm 127 that children conceived in wedlock are a reward from the Lord. Arrows in the hand of a warrior. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them! Actually, that’s not quite what he said. Solomon declared that children are a reward. The “fruit of the womb” as he put it, but he said nothing about the circumstances of conception. Is not that a severe mercy? Because though sin has a way of catching up with us, fornication is a rare and singular form of immorality. What other sin has the same capacity to lead to such immense blessing? Or any blessing? Don’t read that as a license for promiscuity. Read it as a proclamation of the fundamental goodness of God and goodness of sex. Andrew Klavan calls sex one of the “great consolations of a tragic life.” But when it’s no longer happening at the frequency it used to, well, life becomes more tragic. So we turn instead to life’s other consolation: food—which may explain why almost half of Americans are now obese, compared to just 13% in the 1960’s. Or maybe it’s because we’ve quit smoking. Either way, the new vices are worse than the old. Because even when sex occurs sinfully, it still produces tiny image-bearers of God—so long as birth control doesn’t thwart the act of creation and abortion doesn’t strike them dead. How that must infuriate the devil! The new vices, by contrast, don’t leave you with children. They merely leave you all alone.