How did we lose our sense of shame?
The actions and comments of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, former Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers and former UCLA basketball player LiAngelo Ball in recent days make it difficult for us to believe there is intellectually any price to pay for intentionally doing the wrong thing.
Oh, Moore may lose his race in Alabama this week, Conyers resigned from the House and Ball quit his team, but all three men are defiant and largely unrepentant in the face of the misdeeds with which they're confronted.
Their action and the actions of so many others today make it difficult to teach that doing the right thing is, in fact, the right thing.
Moore, the crusading former Alabama Supreme Court judge, is said to have sexually assaulted and harassed nine teenagers and young women more than 30 years ago when he was a decade and a half older than they were.
"These allegations are completely false," he said late last month, "they're malicious; specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with anyone."
The accusations, said the Ten Commandments-promoting Moore, are "simply dirty politics" and "a sign of the immorality of our time."
With his senatorial election set for Tuesday, he didn't soften his denials last week.
"What they've done to me is not only unforgivable," he told AL.com, "it's pure hatred and it's pure spite and it's pure evil and it's wrong. They have made up stuff I would never even consider doing. They've been successful. The press has been a part of it. It's the definition of fake press."
"This is the most dirty political race I've ever been in and I think that anybody could be in."
It's not difficult to believe a national press would try to ruin Moore, but it strains credulity to believe a conspiracy of nine specific women with specific stories of specific times and places could be put in place to hatch such a plan.
Meanwhile, Conyers, 88, first elected to the House in 1964, referred to his "retirement" after numerous allegations of groping and sexual harassment continued to be lodged against him (and one taxpayer-funded settlement already was in the books). But not only is he not sorry, he feels he should pass his congressional seat down to his son, John Conyers III, whom he endorsed.
"My legacy can't be compromised or diminished in any way by what we're going through right now," he told a radio show audience. "This, too, shall pass. My legacy will continue through my children."
Conyers, in a statement read for him on the House floor, also said he hadn't been afforded the process to defend himself but was resigning due to health problems and "to preserve my legacy and good name."
Twenty-seven terms in an overwhelmingly Democratic district in and around Detroit will give one that hubris, that sense of never having to say you're sorry.
On the opposite coast from Washington, D.C., Ball, 19, the true freshman guard, quit his team while enduring an indefinite suspension for his part in a shoplifting incident while the team was in China last month. Ball and his fellow players mouthed rote apologies over the event and said thanks to President Donald Trump for intervening in their case, but Ball's follow-up actions may have given away his lack of sincerity.
While making the media rounds after pulling out of UCLA, the months-out-of-high-school teen downplayed shoplifting in a foreign country.
"We all went out one night, went to the malls, went to the Louis Vuitton store," Ball said, "and, uh, people started taking stuff, and then, you know, me just not thinking and being with them, I took something too.
"And we left thinking we'll just get away - you know how kids think. I didn't realize 'til I got back to my hotel, I'm like, 'That was stupid.' But by then it was too late. And then, sure enough, the next morning, the police came and got us."
And the conditions? Ball described them as if they were, well, a jail.
"Oh, it was horrible," he said. "They take your clothes; you wear, like, whatever they have for you, a little jumpsuit or whatever, take your shoestrings and you just sit in a cement cell for however long. It's just you and all the officers - and they don't speak English."
In the case of Ball's attitude, the apple may not have fallen far from the tree. LaVar Ball, the player's father, already had played down Trump's role in the case, said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had more to do with the release than Trump, and minimized shoplifting - although the players faced up to 10 years in jail - because "being raised in South Central LA, I've seen harsher things."
Then, last week, he couldn't imagine his son still being held back from his "passion." "[F]or them to prolong this and go on and on, it's ridiculous to me."
From the 19-year-old Ball to the 70-year-old Moore to the 88-year-old Conyers, shame seems to be missing. Is there any doubt we need a renewed moral compass in this country?