(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which we inaugurate the first annual or possibly quinquennial (let's see & how it goes) Keeping Up Awards to point up the phenomenon of predictably high- minded behavior among people who ought to know better but then again maybe not: -- For finding and powerfully promoting yet another social problem just when some among us thought we had finally run out of injustices to worry about: Emerging victorious in this closely contested category was television babble- show hostess Oprah Winfrey, who gave a whole hour the other afternoon to the issue of sexual harassment by landlords, now predicted to rapidly overtake worry about obesity in children. -- For unflinching insistence on gender-based equality even when the stock market is tumbling: Here we have no choice but to tap Leonard Silk, longtime sage of the New York Times business pages, whose rambling essay on the tumble's deeper meaning at one point turned to the thought that a lot of characters in the financial markets regard a winning record there as a test of their manhood, at which point Leonard succumbed to an uncontrollable impulse and added ''or womanhood.'' -- For rising far, far above all petty distinctions about the nature of free parliaments: Our landslide winners in this category are the 20 or so U.S. Senators -- everyone on the floor except retrograde conservative Jesse Helms -- who rose in tribute to the members of the Supreme Soviet visiting the Capitol the other day. (Jesse turned his back and drank a glass of water.) -- For a highly ingenious effort at cross-cultural coalition building: And the winner is . . . United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, who showed up at the March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights and appealed for support of his interminable grapes boycott in a speech arguing that the pesticides sprayed on grapes undermine the immune system and make it more vulnerable to AIDS. -- For finding the courage to hold their tongues for a change: The legions of liblab moralizers who have been carrying on 13 to the dozen about rampant unethicism in America's executive suites but keep forgetting to ask when was the last meeting of the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Committee, a question of surpassing relevance now that the federation has decided to readmit the Teamsters some 31 years after the committee was set up, in large part to stamp out mobsterism in the labor movement.