Over at The New Republic, Ruth Franklin — in the course of an article about a boring-looking but very tony book of sex pictures — says some interesting things about sexual liberation:

People who feel genuinely liberated, after all, don’t make a point of pronouncing how liberated they feel. . . . It’s evident in Erica Jong’s new anthology Sugar in My Bowl, for which Jong asked a group of writers to describe the best sex they ever had. The results surprised her. . . . “The older writers in my anthology are raunchier than the younger writers,” Jong complained in a New York Times op-ed last weekend headlined “Is Sex Passé?” “The younger writers are obsessed with motherhood and monogamy.”
But this seems to me to be the definition of sexual freedom—the fact that women have come to regard sex more in the way that men do, as an elemental part of life, no less essential than eating or breathing, and thus no more in need of cheerleading. . . . Sex for women today—in all its forms—is just something that we do, not something for which we need special permission or forgiveness afterward. This wouldn’t be possible, of course, had Erica Jong (and a few of her peers) not brought women’s desire so vividly and loudly to the forefront in the 1970s. But she’s wrong to see her daughter’s complacency as part of a younger generation’s “backlash against sex.”

There is a great deal of truth to Franklin’s comments: Someone who runs around loudly proclaiming “I am sexually liberated!” is, more likely than not, overcompensating for some pretty serious hang-ups. And it’s a very good thing that young people seem less obsessed about sex — and more interested in things like “motherhood and monogamy” — than people of my generation were. (I’m 47). This is all true — but it’s not the whole truth. Gratitude is one of the healthiest human emotions, because it shows that we appreciate the gifts we have been given by God and other people, and therefore are less likely to lose them through negligence. To take just one example, from the realm of sexuality: I have met people younger than myself who, casually and without irony, say “whore” upon learning that an unmarried woman has had sex. (The reader will, I trust, not be surprised to learn that they make no similar comment on hearing that an unmarried man has had sex.) I am grateful that this particular attitude is not culturally dominant in the United States of 2011. To stop being grateful for something like that — to not remind oneself regularly that it is a good thing — is to risk losing touch with something important, and thus to erode the value itself.

And to see what might happen if the value is eroded, we don’t need to look at the human-rights abuses of the sexually repressive thugogracy in Iran. All we need to do is read Mark Steyn’s terrific piece about what has been happening in a public school in Toronto recently: A Muslim prayer service is held in the school cafeteria, in which boys sit in front, girls sit in a second group behind them, and, in the very back, sit menstruating women who are forbidden to participate. Please read Mark’s whole piece, it’s well worth the time. Let me just quote one paragraph:

Imagine if you’re a soi-disant moderate Muslim, genuinely so. You came to Canada because Yemen’s a dump, and you don’t want to waste your life there. And your daughter loves it, and wants to be Canadian, and be just like the other girls in her street. And then she goes to Valley Park Middle School: What if she doesn’t feel it’s a religious obligation to attend Friday prayers (as some Muslims argue)? Think there’s much chance of being able to opt out easily at Valley Park? What if she wants to dress as she wishes to rather than as the Wahhabi/Salafist imam orders? What if she doesn’t want to tell the creepy perve imam whether she’s menstruating or not? What, in other words, is her chance of being able to attend Valley Park as a regular Canadian schoolgirl?

Mark describes quite exactly what can happen in a society that takes its values for granted, and doesn’t remind itself of them. Cultural negligence and amnesia lead to taxpayer funding of this sort of nonsense, in which actual intolerance gains ground under the banner of tolerance.

The examples I’ve discussed here happen to do with sex, but the point applies across the whole sphere of liberties and other cultural achievements. Probably my own favorite area has to do with freedom of religion. If you don’t remind yourself when engaged in religious activities — the Christian on Sunday, the Jew on Saturday, the Muslim on Friday, the atheist with his morning New York Times — that religious liberty is an amazing accomplishment, you’ll end up conceding a lot of ground to powerful forces who want to rein in religious liberties. Some people want to stop the building of a mosque; others want to stop a guy from burning a Koran; still others want to brand Christian opposition to homosexuality as illegal “hate speech.” But a country of people who are genuinely grateful for religious liberty will keep its head screwed on straight.

These are Fourth of July sorts of thoughts, a few days late; and I hope people who are offended by PDPs (public displays of patriotism) will forgive me. But as Ronald Reagan used to say, paraphrasing George M. Cohan: “Some may call it a flag-waving, but right now I can’t think of a better flag to wave.”