"Life's short. Get a divorce."

The words were hard to miss if you were near Chicago's affluent Rush Street a few weeks ago. They blared from a billboard featuring close-ups on two torsos (one male, one female), lots of cleavage and muscle, and little clothing. It was part Bally's ad, part Victoria's Secret, all bad taste.

But it wasn't advertising a health club or a lingerie store. It was advertising a law firm.

The culprit was an outfit called Fetman, Garland & Associates, specializing in broken marriages. As it happens, the members of the firm are all female, which you'd like to think would have made them less likely to resort to this sort of thing. Ah, but that would be naïve. Senior partner Corri Fetman, you see, just wants attention. "Law firm advertising is boring," she says, so "we wanted to try something different."

Mission accomplished. The billboard was covered by national wire services and network news, and calls to the firm reportedly shot up.

But for those of us who find the whole thing appalling, there is a good side to the story: Enough other people found it appalling to do something about it.

Ordinary people didn't like it, judging by the person-on-the-street interviews. ("Talk about family values under attack," said one woman with the misfortune to see the sign whenever she looked to her home office window.) Perhaps more important, though, lawyers disliked it even more — including divorce lawyers who thought the image of their whole profession was being dragged into the mud, as if it didn't have a bad enough name already. Prominent attorneys didn't hold back: They found the billboard "grotesque," "disgusting," "bizarre."

And soon after the story went national, the billboard was gone. A city alderman got on the case and found the billboard didn't have a permit it needed, and within hours it'd been removed.

Technically, this had nothing to do with the offensive content, which legally was probably the right thing to do. (You could argue that there should have been decency laws that applied, but there weren't.) Realistically, though, there's little doubt why things happened so fast. Even with all the sleazy mainstream ads already floating around, the public's moral sensibilities haven't been totally eroded. As desensitized as society is by now, a fair number of folk still get outraged over things they should find outrageous. At least some of the time.

The question is: Why did it happen this time?

I think it's because the billboard was so blatantly cynical. The people behind it tried to defend it in high-sounding language. Its message "promotes happiness and personal integrity," said Fetman. "It's really no different than a motivational book that says 'Live the best life you can.'" But they only sounded ludicrous. Fetman and co. were more honest the first time around, when they openly appealed to lust as an excuse to abandon a spouse and, in many cases, children.

When a message comes across in such crude terms, there's no way to miss just how low it is. Fetman and co. knew their audience, of course: They aimed low. ("We're going to be back," says Fetman, with "more racy photos.") The ad ran in a neighborhood known as — forgive me, there's no tasteful way to report this — the Viagra Triangle. One Web sites calls it "Sin City for the middle-aged and sexy seniors;" another, that it's "populated by drunken frat boys, drunken suburbanites, and drunken mid-life crisis sufferers."

Some people imagine, at least for a time, that a place like this represents the good life — a place where you never have to grow up and can remain forever adolescent. But all too many spouses know the pain of being dumped in favor of someone who's (almost always) younger and more attractive; all too many children know what it's like to deal with a 20-something stepparent.

So it's no wonder that a billboard celebrating the lifestyle choices that created these situations provokes so many people. Chasing lusts isn't harmless fun. In the real world, it means emotional scars and shattered lives.

There's an opportunity for Christians here. Our culture jettisoned God's rules for sexual morality, in the guise of "liberating" us all from "oppressive," outdated standards and ushering us into an era of "free love." But the decades since then have proven disillusioning, to say the least. And when the ugly reality of the sexual revolution stands exposed — when it's boiled down to the brutal philosophy, "Life's short, get a divorce" — we have a chance to illustrate why God gives us His standards in the first place.

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, recalls the story of a schoolboy who's asked what he thinks God is like: "He replied that, as far as he could make out, God is the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then putting a stop to it." Lewis goes on:

And I am afraid that is the sort of idea the word Morality raises in a good many people's minds: something that interferes, something that stops you having a good time. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine.

Christians rightly stress that God's standards are right because they're good — holy and righteous, as He is. But we also need to talk about how they're good for us. We were made to exist in relationship with Him and with each other, and we have to do it in ways that He designed; making up our own ways never works. We can't find genuine happiness and fulfillment by making idols of sex, money, popularity or anything else. We'll just end up denying ourselves the relantionships we were made for.

In fact, as J. Budziszewski pointed out on this site some time ago, we'll become incapable of them. "The more you pursue sex with multiple partners," he noted, "the more you become like adhesive tape that loses its ability to stick. Your sexual partners will seem like strangers; you just won't feel anything. You will have destroyed your capacity for intimacy."

That's how people become pathetic creatures who prowl bars in places with names like the Viagra Triangle. It can't be surprising that, on their journey through self-degradation, they drag down so many other people along the way. We've all heard the expression "I have the right to do whatever I want so long as I don't hurt anyone else." But the emphasis is always on the first part of the sentence; the second part is just window dressing. The words are intended to justify self-indulgence. And whatever he claims, a man who's devoted to self-indulgence generally doesn't stop short of hurting someone else.

Christian standards are a lot more demanding, so they're not always popular. Yet there's no real alternative to a morality based on God's will except one based on human desires, which inevitably means some people using and abusing other people. And that — as too many people are learning to their sorrow — is no morality at all.