Third, your sexual self-expression is brave. If there’s one virtue that virtually all Americans agree upon, it’s valor. We admire bravery. So what is bravery? Well, according to Lady Gaga, and her “Born Brave Bus Tour,” it’s basically doing whatever the heck you want, especially if it involves sex. I grow especially weary of Hollywood’s insistence on honoring its own “courage” for making movies that “trangress boundaries” — meaning that the sexuality shocks some rube in Alabama– even as they bask in each other’s applause.

Fourth, you get to feel morally superior to people who exhibit actual virtue. Why be better when you can simply feel better? We live in an upside-down world, where the people who do next to nothing lord their presumed morality and virtue over those who actually get out their checkbooks and get their hands dirty for the “least of these” in our culture. Faithful Christians — far more despised in pop culture than, say, the Muslim Brotherhood — prop up the world’s largest private relief agencies and give far more time and money to the poor than they ever do to the causes they’re allegedly “obsessed” with — like same-sex marriage.