MORALITY, ANYONE?

Just as Sylvia Porter will help you manage your family budget, just as Heloise can provide those little household tips on how to keep the cat hair off the upholstery, so Father William Lester's column (syndicated in some 75 papers) will help you keep the lint off your soul and keep that moral ledger with the Almighty on the credit side. In this day of runaway permissiveness it's hard to figure out what's Moral and what's Immoral. Fortunately, Lester can provide instant solutions, not in highfalutin' theological arguments but in down to earth practical terms. He certainly doesn't mince his words: capital punishment is moral; test tube babies are not. For criminals corporal punishment is in line with God's intent; rapists may be castrated. Labor strikes are of dubious morality; compulsory arbitration is much better and profit sharing is practically ""a morally ideal condition between management and labor."" Private ownership of property is imperative to true morality. Why, almost everything has a ""moral angle"" -- national health insurance for example is not quite cricket because it's, well, closely akin to socialized medicine. The San Francisco cops when they played a baseball game with the city's ""lavender swishes"" were ""honoring"" an immoral organization. Communal living is ""against nature"" and sex change operations are sinful. You can only hope that God isn't as heartless a bastard as Father Lester.