Remember the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid”?

It isn’t the economy anymore. We’re doing just fine on that right now; better than we have in years, actually. Yet still the left thinks conservatives are demons from hell. Why? You’ll find a large part of the answer right here: It’s the sex, stupid.

Abortion and Gay Marriage

Take the abortion question. They say it’s about women’s rights. But there’s no woman saying, “I need to exercise my rights. That means I’d better go find someone to have sex with.” It’s the other way around. Both women and men want sex without consequences.

Gay marriage is about granting full social approval to homosexual sex. Simple friendships don’t need Supreme Court approval. Civil unions would have given gays the rest of what they wanted — everything except full endorsement of their physical relationships. “Marriage” added only one more thing: training the world to celebrate homosexual sex.

Trampling Parents’ Rights and Religious Freedom

The transgender revolution is just an extension of the same impulse toward rejecting all sexual boundaries. Grade-school children can change their names and “genders” at school without asking or even informing their parents. Why? It’s all about maximizing sexual liberties.

Young girls can obtain contraception and get abortions the same way. Is this because parents have no wisdom? Because they don’t care? Because we allow children generally to make their own medical decisions? Obviously not — except when it comes to sex. It’s all about mowing down every conceivable obstacle to full sexual freedom, including even parents.

Parental freedoms suffer at the hands of sexual freedoms; so does religious freedom. In Canada and much of Europe, it’s legally risky for a pastor to preach against homosexuality. Progressives have tried to put preachers under the same rules in America; they just haven’t gone as far with it, or gotten away with quite as much.

Secularists keep asking, “Why do you Christians make such a big deal over sex?” I laugh. We’re making a big deal over sex? Have you seen a sit-com lately? Or even a commercial for one? I don’t watch the actual shows, because from what I can see from their spots, for most of them, it’s the sex, stupid. (Emphasis on stupid, I’m afraid.)

Trivializing a Good Thing

Sex is good; we all agree on that. It’s also massively powerful; on that we disagree. Christian morality treats sex as the power that it is, and contains it wisely inside proper relationships. The world trivializes it, treating it as something to be toyed with, spreading it everywhere, but thinly. Stripping sex of its power, they also take away its proper joy and satisfaction. They try to make up for it, but stupidly: trivializing it even more, and acting as if “where,” “what,” “how” and “who” don’t matter.

That’s why it’s the sex, everywhere you look. It’s also what’s making us stupid.

I’m not so Freudian (another version of stupid) as to suggest that every national disagreement comes down to sex. It’s still the economy, too, not to mention race, national defense, immigration and all the other standard topics.

But as long as any party, court or religion stands in the way of full sexual freedom, it won’t matter how much good they do; they’re going to feel the wrath of today’s sexual progressives. We saw it in full force at the Kavanaugh hearings. We see it in the nonstop complaints against a chief executive presiding over America’s strongest economy in years. There’s a lot more of the same yet to come.

Tom Gilson is a senior editor with The Stream and the author of Critical Conversations: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens (Kregel Publications, 2016). Follow him on Twitter: @TomGilsonAuthor.