Television commentator Ted Koppel, on a recent Nightline segment, noted President Clinton's high job approval ratings, and then said: "But ask about his honesty, moral and ethical standards or the president as a role model for young people and Mr. Clinton's approval ratings are down around 20 percent."

Koppel then asked several U.S. senators, "What does this say about our country and our values? What's the bottom line? Show me the money? If you're making money for me, what kind of a human being you are is sort of irrelevant?"

Translated, this means as long as the situation (a good economy) is acceptable, you won't be held accountable for misbehavior. This is classic "situation ethics," which has become the new national morality. But from where did this come?

In the 1960s, when God was removed from public schools, values continued to be taught. The student became the new authority for determining what is right and wrong - the autonomous moral decision maker - and decisions were made based upon particular situations.

Leading educator Ted Sizer in 1970 wrote: "Christian sermonizing denies individual autonomy, which lies at the heart of a new morality . . . toward which we are to guide ourselves and other people."

During the 1970s, one kept hearing the mantra, "Don't impose your morality on me." And in 1979, a CBS News poll found 66% of those surveyed would support a leader who would bend the rules to get things done.

In the 1980s, there was a conservative backlash against this humanistic moral relativism, but a co-founder of a four-million member humanist and ethical group, H.J. Blackham, wrote that if schools teach dependence (e.g., morals) upon one's self, they are "more revolutionary than any conspiracy to overthrow the government."

He was right! "If it feels good, do it" was the philosophy of many young people when it came to illicit sex and illegal drugs.

Tipper Gore wrote in the Jan. 8, 1990 Washington Post: "A majority of children surveyed by a Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center thought rape was acceptable. In New York City, rape arrests of 13-year-old boys have increased 200% in the past two years."

The Day America Told the Truth - What People Really Believe About Everything That Really Matters was published the next year. In that book, authors James Patterson and Peter Kim detail poll results showing Americans "are making up their own moral codes," with 9 out of 10 citizens reporting they lie regularly, one-third of all married Americans indicating they've had an affair, and 7% saying that for $10 million they would kill a stranger.

The problem with situation ethics is that nearly all our laws are based on the imposition of a particular morality (e.g., the biblical admonition "Thou shalt not bear false witness . . .") with which some will disagree on occasion. For example, because some people want to lie under oath about sexual matters, society has "imposed its morality" against perjury in those situations. That is why some people in government positions have been impeached or even jailed for having committed perjury.

Concerning allegations of perjury against Clinton, there should not be one law for the powerful and another for the poor. If courts cannot compel witnesses to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then our government will have been "overthrown," as Blackham was quoted above.

We can already see what situation ethics is doing to our teenagers today. According to a recent national poll of more than 20,000 middle and high school students conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics: 70% of high school students admitted cheated on an exam at least once in the last year, 78% said they had lied two or more times, and an amazing 47% acknowledged having stolen something from a store in the last 12 months.

What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society - a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. -Irving Kristol, "My Cold War"

Equivocation has never been Irving Kristol's long suit. About the fact of rot and decadence there can be no dispute, except from those who deny that such terms have meaning, and who are, for that reason, major contributors to rot and decadence. We are accustomed to lamentations about American crime rates, the devastation wrought by drugs, rising illegitimacy, the decline of civility, and the increasing vulgarity of popular entertainment. But the manifestations of American cultural decline are even more widespread, ranging across virtually the entire society, from the violent underclass of the inner cities to our cultural and political elites, from rap music to literary studies, from pornography to law, from journalism to scholarship, from union halls to universities. Wherever one looks, the traditional virtues of this culture are being lost, its vices multiplied, its values degraded - in short, the culture itself is unraveling.

To point the parallel: in a book appropriately titled The Triumph of Vulgarity, Robert Pattison points out that rock music celebrates the unconstrained self

Vulgarity and obscenity are, of course, rife in popular culture. Rock is followed by rap; television situation comedies and magazine advertising increasingly rely on explicit sex; such cultural icons as

Roseanne Barr and Michael Jackson can be seen on family-oriented television clutching their crotches. The prospect is for more and worse.

Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols - universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy.

radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more.

hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses.

our current moral anarchy and statism

The prospects look bleak

This is a picture of a bleak landscape, and there are many who disagree. Optimists point out, for example, that American culture is complex and resilient, that it contains much that is good and healthy, that many families continue to raise children with strong moral values. All that is true. I have been describing trends, not the overall condition of the culture, but the trends have been running the wrong way, dramatically so in the past thirty years. It would be difficult to contend that, the end of racial segregation aside, American culture today is superior to, or even on a par with, the culture of the 1950s.

No one can be certain of the future, of course. Cultures in decline have, unpredictably, turned themselves around before. Perhaps ours will too. Perhaps, ultimately, we will become so sick of the moral and aesthetic environment that is growing in America that stricter standards will be imposed democratically or by moral disapproval. Perhaps we will reject a government that is controlling more and more of our lives. A hopeful sign is the degree to which modern liberalism and its works - political correctness, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and the like - is coming under intellectual attack, not merely from conservative but also from liberal intellectuals. If its intellectual and moral bankruptcy is repeatedly exposed, perhaps modern liberalism will die of shame.

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SENATE'S ACQUITTAL of Bill Clinton, some conservatives are in a state of shock. This is not just because of what he got away with, but because it was the American public's support that enabled Clinton to get away with things that would once have destroyed anyone's political career.

Conservative activist Paul Weyrich -- author of the term "the Moral Majority" -- now says "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority." That is because "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values."

Many other signs of cultural degeneration cause some of us to wonder if we are still living in America. Increasingly, those who believe in traditional values have times when they feel like aliens in the land of their birth.

Some are saying that we have lost the culture wars -- that what used to be called "the counter-culture" is now the dominant influence in American society. Sexual amorality is only part of it. The non-judgmental approach and other leftist fads have poisoned our schools, our criminal justice system and other basic social institutions.

Certainly we have lost some big cultural battles. But you can lose a lot of big battles disastrously and still end up winning the war, as the history of the Civil War or World War II shows.

The Liberals do not see much good in the past like Bork does and are excited about the turmoil families are in because it shows growth. In her book, The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz explains, " Pessimists argue that the family is collapsing; optimists counter that it is merely diversifying. Too often, both camps begin with an ahistorical, static notion of what "the" family was like before the contemporary period. Thus we have one set of best sellers urging us to reaffirm traditional family values in an era of "family collapse" and another promising to set us free from traditional family traps if we can only turn off "old tapes" and break out of old ruts. . . . The actual complexity of our history—even of our own personal experience—gets buried under the weight of an idealized image."

" Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used to be."