I was born and raised in Las Vegas and became very familiar with the alluring attractions of the city: Prostitution, drugs alcohol and the heavy burden of gambling addiction plagued nearly every neighborhood. The strip joints — the shallow shows of the night — do no more than numb the mind to virtue and serve as a gateway to the plague of pornography.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada recently accused Utah and Arizona of turning a "blind eye" to the polygamy issue. I couldn't believe he actually said it. I admit that any religion that has to lock down its worshippers is steeped in darkness and perverseness. However, the social ills spewing from Las Vegas have as much effect on children and families as what is happening in the FLDS Texas compound. What happens behind their gate happens behind many private doors in the Las Vegas Valley. Yet we have been told through cheap advertising, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Nevada's silent elected officials apparently have bought into the slogan.

Mr. Reid said he is a "cheerleader" for the actions of Texas officials and that he is embarrassed for Utah and Arizona. I have followed Mr. Reid over the years and can state he has never picked up the pompoms in his own backyard. Check the contributors to his 30-plus years of campaigns. Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, pinned the senator's recent remarks correctly: self-serving. And, may I add, blatantly hypocritical.

This is not a piece maligning Reid, but his recent fumble is a sad diagnosis of America's spiritual stature and spiritual blindness.

America needs to be called to repentance. We need a course correction. The beginning of this course correction is America admitting its transgressions. We need men and women inspired of God to speak out and lead by example.

Author C.S. Lewis left us with this simple logic: "The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man (or a nation) is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man (or nation) thinks he is all right.

"Good people know about both good and evil," Lewis continued, and "bad people do not know about either."

We ignore the social ills and abuses in the small towns and large cities in our nation and target a selected perverse group in an obscure compound.

We talk of enemies and wars abroad and very little of the enemies and wars domestically. Circus-tent politics and beauty-pageant Christianity are not the answer. The corrective course must come from the "one God and Father of all."

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Ryan Jenkins of Layton writes religious curriculum.