@Michael W Perry, if you want people to actually read your posts, try being more to the point. Who has time to read a 5 page rant in this day and age?!

I read the beginning, skipped to the end, something about single moms?! You must have looked at the wrong ad.

No, what Amazon is doing is simply going after the money and neither babies nor those hapless moms have much money to put in Amazon’s shopping carts. I know. I meet those unfortunate moms all the time. In some outside work I did last week, one was delighted when I let her pick up all the tips rather than insist that I deserved half. I figured she needed the money far more than I.

Keep in mind that the latter problem has grown so bad, as Charles Murray demonstrates in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, that even the NY Times has begun to recognize it. From what I can see, it’s the central source of misery in our society. Amazon’s silence on the topic, its refusal to contribute to political solutions that help those fatherless kids, speaks quite loudly about its corporate indifference. Greed reigns supreme in all those buildings that Amazon is erecting in Seattle’s South Lake Union district.

And at the core of the problem are two defective ideas. One’s illustrated by that Amazon ad, separating the concept of marriage from that of a man and woman raising children. Every society needs that not only to be healthy, but to continue to exist at all. Raising kids well matters a lot. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no value to society in attaching importance to two people, whatever their sex, rolling around in bed. It doesn’t even mean that they like or will continue to like one another. We might as well attach a supreme value to getting drunk, becoming stoned or, less destructively, taking a walk in a park.

The second is a repetition, with a different concept, of the greatest failure of the nineteenth century. During that century, Europe was wrestling with what supreme concept could replace its loss of faith in God. As Hannah Arendt notes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, two ideas won out, nationalism and socialism. Either has a place as one value among many. We should be patriotic and society should help the less fortunate.

But both are utterly dangerous as The Ultimate Source of All Meaning. History demonstrates that all too well. The end product of nationalism was Nazism. The end product of socialism was the communism of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Nothing human makes an adequate god.

Our society, and indeed all of Western civilization, is now engaging in that same madness about sex. You see it in the same telling characteristics that were true of deified nationalism and socialism. Both are warnings that something that isn’t God is being made into a god.

1. Suppressing contrary points of view. When I mentioned to one homosexual I’d met that we needed to take into account Alfred Kinsey’s data that fully a quarter of male homosexuals focused their interest on young boys, he told me that I should be jailed for saying that. “Jailed for repeating Kinsey data,” I told myself. “You’ve got to be really sexually radical to want to censor the views of the twentieth century’s greatest sexual radical.” Make a point of view godlike, and you quickly develop the secular equivalent of blasphemy laws. You even turn on your own. As historians have noted, revolutions typically devour their founders. Kinsey the pioneer becomes someone to silence. Like Stalin’s Marxist colleagues, he’ll be airbrushed out of history.

2. Violence and destruction directed at those who threaten the deified worldview on a massive scale. Jews, Slavs and others threatened the purity of German nationalism and had to be killed. People with a talent for economic success (Kulaks and under Pol Pot, those with an education) threatened communism and also had to be killed in by the millions.

In the same fashion, babies threaten a deified worldview that claims that sex (at least of the heterosexual sort) has nothing to do with marriage, families and kids. Read the Supreme Court decisions and you’ll see underneath the legalese that, while abortion was initially legalized to reduce birthrates among the black underclass (Roe in 1973), since 1982 the abortion majority on the court has been arguing for the deification of sex. as a supreme value.

That doesn’t work. One of the central problems of our society is that, while babies may be legally abortable, they’re not being aborted in nearly enough numbers. Unable to find husbands in a society that has disconnected sex from marriage and families, many young women still insist on having children. That’s the reason for a recently announced and most disturbing statistic–that fully half of the births to women under 30 now involve women who don’t have a husband and a father to help with the burdens of rearing that child.

That’s why there’s no reason to find anything impressive in Amazon’s latest ad. Like many corporations, Amazon’s executives are so tightly focused on their bottom line that they’re of no real value to society. And that’s why I’m a capitalist in the same sense that Churchill defended democracy. It’s merely less bad than the alternatives.

Of course, in the long run the social ills that Amazon is doing nothing about will turn and destroy their own profitability. Single moms who’re having trouble putting food on the table don’t have the money to spend on Amazon’s more profitable products. And kids that grow up in such homes will live forever after with two strikes against them. They’ll never make very profitable consumers.

Some of this will be touched on in a short book I’ve almost finished, Carina, The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No. The book will be free as part an effort to help girls like the one in its title, so you might want to look for it. Unfortunately, the bulk what needs to be said will have to wait for a later book that’s still little more than a concept.

And in that book-to-be I may even use that silly Amazon ad as an illustration of this cruel and ultimately destructive folly.