Faithful marriage is the best anti-poverty program, the best educational program, the best anti-crime program, and the best defense against loneliness and social anomie. Conversely, the sexual revolution has exacerbated these and other evils. There are the abortions, the diseases, the exploitation, the cruelty, the dehumanization, and more.

Sexual sin destroys justice.

This is a problem for those on the religious left who insist that social justice (by which they mean the Democratic Party platform) matters more than sins of the flesh—if they even consider those to be sins.

Consider a recent New York Times piece carrying the headline “Pope Leo Chooses Social Justice Over Pelvic Theology.” The author, David Gibson of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, argued that the pope “is trying to shift Catholicism away from the near fixation on ‘pelvic theology,’ or sexual morality, that has come to define Catholicism, especially in Leo’s home country, the United States.”

Near fixation—really? Homilies on what Gibson derides as “pelvic theology” tend to be few and far between even in conservative parishes. But Gibson is interested in advocacy, not accuracy. His goal is to claim the pope for the cause of social justice while sidelining Catholic teachings about sexual morality. Thus, though Gibson admitted that the pope wasn’t changing Catholic sexual teaching, he downplayed that fact, insisting that the pope “was articulating an older tradition of placing justice above personal chastity.”

Gibson presents Christian sexual ethics as a secondary issue that has been blown all out of proportion. Forget the pelvic issues, in other words, because climate change and Medicare for all are what real Christians should be concerned with. This is a standard trope among liberal Christians, but it is nonsense. Gibson inadvertently admitted as much with his complaint that, “The sexual revolution of the 1960s and the loosening of restrictions on abortion in the 1970s turbocharged the push to focus on sexual ethics and sideline social justice.“

But there is no social justice when the law allows human lives in utero to be violently ended by the millions. Nor is this just about “personal chastity”—the sexual revolution wasn’t about privately breaking the rules, but abolishing them.

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