“Deviant” is a word we don’t hear much anymore, for the simple reason that its meaning has become invalid or irrelevant or, as any Democrat would say, an expression of hate. America has in recent years gradually lost its vocabulary of moral judgment. “Deviant,” “abnormal,” “perverse,” “immoral” — each of these terms for sexual behavior that is wrong and bad implies the existence of an antonym for what is right and good. Anyone who cares to research the etymology of “deviant” and “perverse,” for example, will find that both of these words suggest a turning away from something. But from what have perverts like Anthony Weiner and deviants like Sydney Leathers turned away? We simply aren’t allowed to say it. Politically correctness forbids us to assert that any form of sexual behavior is more wholesome or more normal than any other. And no one in American public life dares use the word “sin” nowadays.

During the Freudian heyday of the mid-20th century, psychiatry replaced religion as the regnant authority among America’s elite. Once we were taught to think of ourselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God. That was before the Supreme Court and Time magazine vanquished the Lord. God is dead, the journalists told us, and the deceased Deity cannot even be mentioned in public schools. What was formerly called “sin” was redefined as sickness, and condemnation of moral depravity was replaced by a therapeutic sympathy for the helpless sufferers of various psychological “syndromes.” The habitually promiscuous woman, for example, was said to be afflicted with nymphomania. The evocative significance of that term inspired much frustration among young fellows who — eager to provide the supply for the nymphomaniac’s abnormal demand, as an economist might say — discovered such shamelessly insatiable females to be quite rare.