First there was John Mark Karr, whom we found out is not the murderer of JonBenet Ramsey that for some reason he claimed to be. He is still, though, facing charges of possession of child pornography. Then there was the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the polygamous cult leader accused of marrying off underage girls. He’s also alleged to have used his power as a self-proclaimed prophet to punish dissenters by taking away their children or their spouses and redistributing them to other more obedient acolytes.
What can we learn from Karr and Jeffs that will not force us into utter despair about the moral disintegration of humanity, forcing an expensive move to a remote desert island?
The lesson of Karr that we might all want to consider is the consequences of pimping our children. There is, I believe, an unbroken line linking the tapes of JonBenet seductively prancing around in little-girl beauty contests and the sight of our daughters, too many of whom went back to school dressed not for study but for seduction. The transformation of American women into sex objects begins when they are just little girls like JonBenet, and the only ones who thoroughly enjoy this are people like John Mark Karr.
It’s cheap fun to condemn mullahs who order women beaten for showing a glimpse of stocking, but the lesson of modesty must not be seen as merely a fundamentalist obsession. We cannot sex up our daughters without feeding the appetites of both hormonally challenged high-school boys and also those waiting in the shadows and online. It is time for the cause of sexual modesty to be embraced not just by religious fundamentalists but by all parents and by all intelligent kids and by all liberals and libertarians. Modesty is not just good for some repressive ideology. Modesty is good for kids and the main reason is that it protects their innocence.
If you want this caution delivered with biblical resonance consider Lev. 19:29, which says, “Do not prostitute your daughter, to cause her to be a harlot, lest the land fall into harlotry, and the land become full of wickedness.” If you prefer more secular intonations, remember Yeats’s famous poem, “The Second Coming”:
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …
The Internet has put us beyond the time when our pornographic culture can be artificially suppressed, and in a way I am glad for that because it puts the challenge of raising modest daughters and respectful sons back where it belongs, in our homes and hearts and houses of worship. We must help our kids freely embrace the ceremony of innocence by freely choosing moral and modest lives that are incompatible with the predatory dangers of the Web.
To me the most interesting issue in the Jeffs case is not him. Marrying off underage children is obviously both illegal and disgusting. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Warren Jeffs is a prophet needs a fast course in both theology and common sense. I think I remember a biblical verse, “Take heed unto thyself that ye not follow prophets who driveth red Cadillac SUVs.” No, the big issue is the increasing campaign for the social acceptance of polygamy that it highlights.
Polygamy, or plural marriage, is at the beginning of a campaign for acceptance that same-sex marriage began years ago. I am not willing at the moment to unpack the arguments for or against same-sex marriage or plural marriage, but what is absolutely clear is that if we as a society are willing to bestow the legal standing of marriage upon some nontraditional unions between consenting adults, then both logic and fairness compels us to also privilege the claims of other nontraditional yet clearly consensual unions. Rejecting Jeffs because he married off kids is easy. Rejecting Jeffs because he believed in plural marriage is not so easy for people who are already committed to allowing same-sex marriages.
What has to happen to resolve this is not ideological vituperation but rather a serious and open-minded cultural conversation about whether the marriage between one man and one woman (at a time) is just an arbitrary and discriminatory cultural practice like slavery, or, on the other hand, something that reflects a much deeper need and a much deeper human truth. More on this later.
