The American Spectator

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To Be Absolutely Frank

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In fact, the process has been much more drawn out, yet despite the protests of some people and the misgivings of many more, its progress has been inexorable.

Just think. When I was in college in the early '80s, at a famously liberal northeastern university, my friends and I flattered ourselves that we were the height of sophisticated nonchalance. Yet when one of us moved into an off-campus apartment with his girlfriend, the rest of us were startled. Almost a decade after sit-coms had thoroughly dealt with the question, and had decided it in favor of liberty, it still seemed daring to live in sin.

Today I don't know any American families who would make a fuss if their college-age kids cohabited. There are many such families, of course, but the fact that I don't know any of them -- and I know some pretty conservative people -- suggests how widely the conviction has spread that sexual behavior is simply a matter of personal choice.

David Frum writes that Americans today prize sexual liberty the way they did economic liberty at the end of the 19th century and religious liberty at the end of the 18th. For anyone hoping for an imminent pendulum swing in the direction of continence, this is a discouraging analogy. Those other freedoms did not exactly turn out to be passing fads.