On a muggy mid-August night in Detroit a 33-year-old single mother out for a night on the town found herself terrorized by a young, urban thug.

Before crossing a bridge over the Detroit River on a popular strip at about 3 a.m., Deletha Word was involved in two minor traffic accidents on Belle Island. Instead of stopping to assess the damage, she drove on. She would soon regret it.

The car she hit, with three young men inside, chased her onto the bridge connecting the island with Detroit. They rammed her car, forcing her to stop. One of the men then smashed her car with a crowbar and pulled her out. As she fought him, he ripped off her clothes. The man pushed her against the car and proceeded to beat her, threatening to "kill the b----." The petite college student, now stripped to her underwear, fled to the edge of the bridge. Whether she was pushed off or jumped is unclear. Her body, missing a leg, was found several miles downstream later that morning.

Initial reports on the incident were that bystanders honked their car horns while they delayed by the clamor. The bystanders stood idly by while the woman was beaten and, eventually, flung over the bridge railing. Only one man on the crowded bridge, Lawrence Walker, 21, jumped into the water to try to help. Walker said others only laughed at the woman's plight.

Authorities have since repudiated Walker's claim that bystanders joked and cheered while Word was stripped and beaten, although they didn't deny the crowd's apathy.

You might contend that Word shouldn't have been out alone at 3 a.m. She also shouldn't have attempted to flee the scene of an accident she apparently caused.

But where does a hulking, 300-pound teen-ager get the idea that he should beat the woman and, at least indirectly, cause her death?

On a desolate stretch of road, with no witnesses, it's easier to imagine something like this happening. But on a popular late-night strip, you would think a young woman would be safe from such a senseless attack. What can be said about the bystanders' inaction? What can be said about a society that is offended by the notion of a cheering crowd watching a woman stripped, beaten and killed, but is somehow relieved to learn that no one really cheered after all?

No sane person would attempt to justify the actions of the youth who vandalized Word's car and beat her. But why didn't anyone at the scene, save for Lawrence Walker, intervene?

The answer strikes at the heart of the culture war now raging in this country. When folks talk about the need to restore Judeo-Christian values, it is to counter the prevalence of another morality: a morality that tolerates as thinkable the unthinkables of a generation ago.

When the standard of intact families is abandoned so as to not render judgment on illegitimacy and wantonness, we reap the aftermath in aimless and lawless young men -- the fruits of out nation's promiscuity -- skulking on our city streets. When the standards of civility give way to self-centered lusts, and when relativity and situation ethics usurp religious absolutes, we needn't be surprised that chaos ascends in the wake.

A society that celebrates licentiousness and violence through its art and media must accept culpability for its own destruction.

On one side of the culture war are those who want only to do their own thing and to shun accountability. On the other side are those who oppose such attitudes not because they corrupt the individual, but because enough corrupted individuals eventually will corrupt society.

That our society is decaying is obvious as illustrated not only in Detroit this week but wherever violence, illegitimacy and irresponsibility thrive. Our cultural slide isn't likely to reverse until people begin to connect spiritual, moral and cultural decline to society's disintegration.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.