Pray that all the news about sexual impropriety will result in a return to God and to His standards for sexuality.

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Cor. 6:18-20)

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“Washington Post columnist Christine Emba wrote a piece headlined “Let’s Rethink Sex.” It’s a commendable essay in a lot of ways, but the headline is a bit misleading in the sense that it advocates rethinking a view of sexuality that much of the country never signed on to in the first place, and indeed, spent decades warning about the consequences of. . . .

It’s not that sex in and of itself is the problem. But the idea that pursuing one’s sexual imperatives should take precedence over workplace rules, lines of power or even just appropriate social behavior is what allows predators to justify sexual harassment and assault. And it encourages the not-predators to value their desires above those of others.

So what to do?….

…[I]it’s worth noting that it wasn’t “society” writ large that boarded the sex train—it was the culturally influential liberal elites who control the universities, the media, and the entertainment industrial complex. Further, there’s a giant subculture who never boarded the train. They’re called religious believers. This isn’t to say that Christians and Jews and Mormons and Muslims all completely abstained from premarital sex—obviously they didn’t. But they never formally moralized it and have always viewed premarital sex as damaging to one’s spiritual health, in addition to warning against the negative temporal consequences….

First, how exactly does one reintroduce “prudence, temperance, respect and even love” to the strata of society where sex outside of marriage can never even be discouraged, let alone judged negatively?….

None of which is to say that America was free of injustice—sexual or otherwise—50 years ago. It wasn’t. But social progress is rarely an untempered good and it isn’t like there haven’t been other sectors of society—those outside of Emba’s field of vision—who didn’t spent the last half century warning about the costs of sexal “liberation.” The entire body of Judeo-Christian thought has held that certain institutions regulating sexual behavior, protecting women, and supporting families, were worth maintaining and preserving. A great many Americans have even advocated conserving these institutions—and to whatever extent people failed in their own practice, their personal hypocrisy was the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Liberals, on the other hand, have been quite explicit about the fact that their long-term project was to destroy these same institutions….

The political divide breaks down like this: Conservatives believe that people should have a maximal amount of freedom when it comes to their opinions, possessions, and income—but also that people should retain the right to make judgments about both the idea and practice of virtue. And when conservatives make such judgments, they’re told that they’re “intolerant….

On the flipside, modern American liberals have a laundry list of freedoms they’re dying to curtail: what kind of soda you can drink, what words you can say, what firearms you can own. But there is no belief more sacred to the liberal mind than total bodily autonomy when it comes to sexual and reproductive behavior, regardless of the consequences….

It’s way past due for liberals to meet conservatives halfway on some some important social issues. A good first step is acknowledging that conservatives were right about sex all along: That there is a connection between sex and virtue, and that our politics and our culture should do everything possible to strengthen this connection. (Excerpted from The Weekly Standard, by Mark Hemingway.)