The other day Stelton University shut down the university’s student newspaper. The students had published their annual April 1st issue laced with foul language, pornography, racial slurs and stereotypes, and just plain filth. The edition contained a number of absurd phony advertisements including one full of profanity, "Because we are allowed to print it."

Because we can. What a crock of nonsense. We live in a country with as much or more freedom of thought and action than anywhere else in the world and probably more than any other age in the world. The problem is, each generation is disposed to push the envelope. When that happens, things don’t get better, they always degenerate. Along with freedom comes responsibility that we in the Church call agency — also said as "just because we can doesn’t mean that we should."

"Because we can" cannot lead anywhere that enlightens, beautifies, or enhances our quality of life. It suggests that there are no moral or ethical absolutes, that anything has to be allowed, and that the right of the individual trumps the rights of the group.

It’s also a sign of immaturity, of being unable to relate actions to consequences. When the school shut down the student paper,

Staffers said they were disappointed they were fired without warning and that even people who had no say in the paper’s editorial content lost their jobs.

Of course people would complain loudly and bitterly about that edition of the student newspaper. Of course the University would have to take action. Of course that action would have consequences far beyond anything the students had envisioned as they gleefully took their childishness to press.

In 1970 I was going to school at Purdue University. The Vietnam War was in full swing and there was no end in sight. I had recently finished my time in the U.S. Air Force and was going to school to earn a degree. A small group of students, in the name of protesting a war about which they had no real knowledge and no experience took over the administration building and shut down operations at the University for several days. The administration building was simply an easy target of opportunity for their protest. They caused thousands of dollars of damage and forced the University to implement a myriad of security precautions to prevent future damage. They also cost me a week of classes. I considered their actions childish beyond belief then and even today I’m somewhat incredulous that they would undertake such an action. The one place that was open and available to them to learn moral and ethical behavior, to learn how to apply principles of logical thinking, to learn what history has to offer so that we can make the future better, that was the place they shut down and trashed. There were far better and much more effective ways to express their feelings about the Vietnam War but those would take a little maturity and education to exploit. Shortly thereafter, another protest at Kent State University resulted in the National Guard opening fire on the students, killing some of them. "Because we can" had degenerated into death.

In General Conference last week, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland talked about the responsibility of parents to provide this moral baseline for their children:

Not long ago Sister Holland and I met a fine young man who came in contact with us after he had been roaming around through the occult and sorting through a variety of Eastern religions, all in an attempt to find religious faith. His father, he admitted, believed in nothing whatsoever. But his grandfather, he said, was actually a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "But he didn’t do much with it," the young man said. "He was always pretty cynical about the Church." From a grandfather who is cynical to a son who is agnostic to a grandson who is now looking desperately for what God had already once given his family! What a classic example of the warning Elder Richard L. Evans once gave.

Said he: "Sometimes some parents mistakenly feel that they can relax a little as to conduct and conformity or take perhaps a so called liberal view of basic and fundamental things—thinking that a little laxness or indulgence won’t matter—or they may fail to teach or to attend Church, or may voice critical views. Some parents . . . seem to feel that they can ease up a little on the fundamentals without affecting their family or their family’s future. But," he observed, "if a parent goes a little off course, the children are likely to exceed the parent’s example."

To lead a child (or anyone else!), even inadvertently, away from faithfulness, away from loyalty and bedrock belief simply because we want to be clever or independent is license no parent nor any other person has ever been given. In matters of religion a skeptical mind is not a higher manifestation of virtue than is a believing heart, and analytical deconstruction in the field of, say, literary fiction can be just plain old-fashioned destruction when transferred to families yearning for faith at home. And such a deviation from the true course can be deceptively slow and subtle in its impact. As one observer said, "[If you raise the temperature of my] bath water . . . only 1 degree every 10 minutes, how [will I] know when to scream?"

There are moral and ethical absolutes. I firmly believe that just because we can doesn’t mean that we should. If it doesn’t improve the quality of life, lift up mankind, make things a little better and brighter, then it is a waste of time. How much better the students at Stelton University could have made use of their time! They could have set a new high-water-mark for April Foolery. They could have done something that would have resulted in a flood of phone calls, e-mails, and letters praising their work and delighting in their creativity. Instead, they selfishly sank to a new low in student journalism. And we’re all the worse off for it. Shame on them all.