The scourge of pornography is now so pervasive that it begins to define the culture at large.  America is fast transforming itself from a society that allows and markets pornography into a culture that is pornographic.  Boundary after boundary is being transgressed.

In contemporary America, pornography is both a public reality and big business.  Ambient pornography — sexually explicit advertising, entertainment, and merchandising — is all around us.  But pornography is also big business, producing sexually explicit materials in printed, video, and digital formats and making billions of dollars in the process.

As is so often the case, research comes with both good news and bad news. Ellison Research conducted a survey of representative Americans to find out what the public believes about sin. The good news is the simple part — the vast majority of Americans believe in sin.

Peggy Noonan is right. At some point, in some moment, all of us must admit that something remarkable has happened to American culture. Mrs. Noonan, a former presidential speechwriter, recalls that this moment came for her during a high school graduation in the early 1970s. A young girl walked across the stage to received her diploma. The girl was obviously pregnant. Noonan recalls that her first impulse was admiration for the girl’s grit and determination against social disapproval. “But,” recognized Noonan, “society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding.” As she reflected, “Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother, not good for us.”

The fact that many young women are recapturing a vision of virginity until marriage has attracted a considerable amount of media attention. Media coverage has been devoted to books by authors such as Wendy Shalit and Dawn Eden and to programs encouraging sexual abstinence until marriage. The force of our cultural and moral revolution is immediately apparent in the fact that these developments are considered newsworthy. Since when did virginity make news?

I do not often find myself in hearty agreement with Bob Herbert of The New York Times, but his column released yesterday is too brilliant and haunting to resist. As a matter of fact, Mr. Herbert’s argument is so compelling that I am breaking a promise to myself and naming a name I had steadfastly refused to name — Anna Nicole Smith. Stay with me now.