The adulterous couple caught on the Jumbotron earlier this month has become the object of scorn, ridicule and endless internet memes. I plan not to pile on. Instead, I want to call attention to how this incident disproves the seductive promise of the sexual revolution: “You can do anything you want sexually, and nothing bad will happen.”  

This tacit promise explains why the sexual revolution is so appealing: Everyone wants to believe this is true. But the strong public reactions to the “Coldplay Couple” show us that not only is this promise false, but we all know it is false.  

“Now come on, Dr. Morse. No one really says nothing bad will happen.” True. Anyone who just blurted it out loud would look like an idiot. On the other hand, the instant brush-off we get whenever we raise objections tells us that this is precisely the idea that lurks below the surface.  

People who are faithful to the ancient teachings of the Catholic Church say, “Sex belongs exclusively in marriage.” We are told, “You are so old-fashioned. We have contraception now. Anyone can have sex as long as both people consent and you use your contraception correctly and consistently.”  

These conditions and qualifiers are tell-tale signs of how thin the “promise” really is. No one uses their contraception “consistently and correctly” enough to avoid all pregnancies and all sexually transmitted infections. And even if a pair of randy teenagers did avoid those undeniable physical problems, one or both of them might very well get a broken heart.  

But never mind. Children in public schools routinely receive the message: “You’re entitled to have sex.” 

Mature adults get a slightly upgraded version of the same message. Our professors of economics or political science or even philosophy gussy up John Stuart Mill’s “Harm Principle” and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man.  

Mill, a British utilitarian philosopher, articulated this principle in his famous 1859 essay, “On Liberty,” while the French stated in 1789, “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else.” Generations of people, especially in the Anglo-American world, have enthusiastically embraced this appealing idea.  

Unfortunately, the Harm Principle is not too specific about what counts as a “harm.” To be fair, some philosophers, including Mill himself, attempted to lay down general principles that might justify legal consequences for some public harms. But that nuance is seldom considered in the realm of sexual activity. We are all too happy as a culture to accept the general doctrine that we are not required to look too closely at this question.  

This brings us to the Coldplay Couple. In spite of endless propaganda promoting nonmarital sex, including propaganda endorsing “open marriage,” people still believe adultery is wrong. We instinctively know that someone is harmed, namely, the spouses of the adulterous couple. Most adults can imagine themselves at the receiving end of sexual infidelity, and they can intuit how incredibly painful it would be.  

Unfortunately, our cultural empathy does not so readily extend to other situations. For instance, the couple’s infidelity surely harms their children. We should all know that children benefit from their parents’ love. But ever since society enacted the “no-fault” divorce regime, we have acted as a collective culture as if the stability of the relationship is not a good worth defending. One spouse can end the marriage for any reason, including a desire for a new partner.  

The law confines itself to redistributing the assets of the family, including the most precious: access to the children. We assure ourselves that no one was harmed with the bromide “Kids are resilient.”  

This is not the only facet of the sexual revolution with a myopic view of harm to others. When a man leaves his wife to live as a woman, we give no thought as a modern society to his abandoned wife. If we consider his children at all, we expect them to “move on” and be happy that their father is being “his true self.”  

The long-term impact on a teenage boy of no longer having a male father but the illusion of having two “mothers” — that doesn’t count as a harm. When a woman leaves her husband and children to live with another woman, we’ve been socialized by decades of propaganda to keep our judgmental, bossy mouths shut: “She isn’t hurting anybody. Mind your own business.” After all, she was “born that way” — the lesbian life is her only chance of happiness. The possible harm to the children isn’t even on the radar.  

The incident of the Coldplay Couple can remind us: When the subject is our tendency to sin, we are all “born that way.” We are also all born with a tendency to minimize the harm we do to others. The public conversation about the Coldplay Couple allows us to get to the heart of the problem: “You can do whatever you want sexually, and nothing bad will happen. Not to you. Not to anyone around you.” This superficially appealing belief is nothing more than a rationalization.  

Now that I have “said the quiet part out loud,” I invite you to look for this idea elsewhere. I think you’ll see it has insinuated itself into virtually every nook and cranny of society. We need to stop the wishful thinking and self-deception. That is why I am grateful to authors like Patti Maguire Armstrong for encouraging us to pray for these individuals to repent. We need better laws and a more wholesome culture, to be sure. But authentic repentance and personal self-reform, with the help of God’s grace, is the only lasting answer.