A few sources of hope we ought to try to re moralize work.

And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food.

We have no right to moralize, and we have much to learn from others. Fortunately, our founding fathers gave us the exceptional gift of a political system that pushes us continually in the direction of self correction.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading contender in the French presidential election, recently lashed out against what he called speculative capitalism, and says he wants to moralize the financial zone created by the euro. What does Sarkozy mean by speculative capitalism?

Instead of showing solidarity, they moralize, as though all of the problems in Mediterranean Europe were the result of native laziness or its citizens corrupt nature. As a result, the moralizers risk bringing the common roof down on Europe s head, and confronting the nationalist dangers that the EU was created to prevent.

(Europe has more single mothers than the US, but, characteristically, has less need to moralize about them one way or the other). In US pop culture, the single mother has evolved from selfish yuppie or drug dazed slut into a woman who is more fun, slightly more heroic, and certainly less frumpy than her married counterpart.