The powerful parable of the kiss cam

There are things you just can’t unsee, and there are also things you can only see for what they are. Sometimes they come in the same picture. When a middle-aged couple at a Coldplay concert goes up on “Kiss Cam” while in a rather physical embrace, only to separate, hide faces, and dive for cover, there are, shall we say, few likely explanations. Chris Martin, Coldplay’s frontman, had warned the crowd that the event would feature video of concertgoers, who would go up on massive screens and be sung to as part of the show. “So, if you look at the screens, we’re going to come looking and see who’s out there to say hello,” Martin added.

Well, when they said hello to one particular embracing couple, something went haywire. “Oh, look at those two,” Martin jested. Then, as the crowd looked, “those two” dove for cover. Martin, as surprised as the crowd, did manage to get quickly to the point: “Wow, what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure what to do.”

We might not even know about this but for the fact that another concertgoer, Grace Springer, caught it all on video and posted it to social media. Springer went home, posted the video, and went to bed. She awoke the next morning to find that her post had gone nuclear, even then at 30 million views. The post would be viewed 77 million times in the next few hours. She told a newspaper, “I had no idea who the couple was. Just thought it was an interesting reaction to the kiss cam and decided to post it.” When she (and seemingly a good portion of the world’s population) found out what was going on, Springer did see the moral point and expressed it rather clearly: “A part of me feels bad for turning these people’s lives upside down, but, play stupid games … win stupid prizes.”

There is a lot more to this story than stupid, but stupid is a good place to start. We now know that the couple was Andy Byron, then CEO of Astronomer, an ambitious software firm in the midst of a big capital expansion plan, and Kristin Cabot, the company’s “chief people officer.” I know, I know, the irony is thick. We have to move on. Within hours, the company had posted that it was launching an investigation in keeping with “the values and the culture that have guided us since our founding,” without any further explanation of what those values are, and then quickly posted that Byron had resigned.

There will be more to the story, for sure. But isn’t it interesting that even in our age of self-declared sexual and moral liberation, we still find it interesting that a couple appears to be caught on camera in an illicit embrace, only to try to undo that embrace—in a way sure to invite interest and moral judgment? Furthermore, isn’t it interesting that our culture is still capable of coming to the quick moral judgment that adultery is wrong? The prophets of moral relativism want that Kiss Cam video to be unremarkable—just two autonomous human beings doing what autonomous human beings, one male and one female, can do. But it just isn’t possible to look at that video without moral judgment, even in this age of supposed sexual non-judgmentalism.

Some observers insisted that the issue isn’t sex, but corporate ethics. In the past couple of decades, numerous male chief executives have gone down in sexual scandal with women who were involved in their businesses. Just months ago, Kohl’s fired then CEO Ashley Buchanan “for cause” after discovering that Buchanan had been romantically involved (and openly cohabitating) with Chandra Holt, former CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond, who was starting a new company selling coffee products. The Wall Street Journal reported that Buchanan had been fired “after an investigation found he had violated the company’s ethics code, saying he had helped arrange a deal to sell Holt’s coffee products.” There was more to the story, of course, but the pattern is increasingly common, and there seems to be little evidence that these scandals have led to moral awakening in the executive suites.

But the corporate ethics dodge doesn’t really play out. It’s not just hanky-panky with an employee or a vendor that is at stake, it’s the violation of an entire moral order. The stark awareness of that violation can’t be turned off, which explains why the trauma now inflicted on Andy Byron’s wife and young children had to be acknowledged. They are the most direct victims, along with Cabot’s family, not yet fully identified.

The attempt to insist that modern corporate ethics have nothing to do with that older moral knowledge rooted in creation order and Holy Scripture doesn’t work. It turns out that marriage vows are of essential moral importance in themselves. In 2019 the National Academy of Sciences published a study that linked sexual infidelity among executives to numerous violations of corporate ethics. In short, executives who break their marriage vows are also more likely to be found guilty of financial misbehavior as well. That’s a surprise?

Christians understand that this is entirely predictable. We also have to underline the fact that marriage, the union of a man and a woman, is so fundamental to human society that even one act of infidelity rips a tear in the moral fabric of the entire society.

We also know that sin makes you look stupid. Stupendously stupid. Certainly, stupid on Kiss Cam, but more tragically stupid before the entire cosmos. Stupid in this sense is both fascinating and grotesquely comic. That’s the way sin looks, when exposed. That couple diving for the floor looks stupid. The hours ahead just underlined how stupid. That little Kiss Cam video cost those two people millions and millions of dollars. Those few seconds may have destroyed more than one marriage, more than one family. That video revealed an attempted subversion of the entire moral universe.

That’s why the video became a cultural obsession. It will be gone tomorrow, but the moral damage will continue. There will be yet another video scandal in short order. Of that you can be certain.