Where
Do We Go From Here?
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/14/18
The Sexual Revolution
has long been over and both sides lost.
One side, the revolutionaries, argued that sexual freedom was natural,
that the restraints of past years were “Puritanical,” “Victorian,” and out of
touch with modernity.
To the revolutionaries,
“sexual purity” was laughable. Birth
control, they asserted, had rendered restraint unnecessary. Sex education would give teens all they
needed to deal with their new freedom and its risks of venereal diseases and
pregnancy.
The revolutionaries
apparently never taught high school or college.
Perhaps they failed to understand that adolescence is a time in our
lives when all the education in the world cannot overcome youthful passions in
the absence of a moral upbringing.
The revolutionaries
made light of the other side, the traditionalists. Traditionalists argued that sex was sacred,
not just another form of pleasure. The
revolutionaries scoffed at the new expression of the seventies, “traditional
values.” They argued that wherever sex
education failed, it was because there
wasn’t enough of it, or it wasn’t being introduced early enough.
The line for this great
divide was first drawn in 1948 when the famous “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey
published “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and in 1953, “Sexual Behavior in
the Human Female.” Kinsey’s “findings” about sexuality, woefully
unscientific and based on interviews, were refuted by many psychologists;
however, Kinsey and other likeminded “sexologists” continued to assert that
happiness and fulfillment come from expressing one’s sexual urges regardless of
cultural norms or religious beliefs.
After Kinsey, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire emerged, presenting casual
sex as a lifestyle. Today, with internet
and cable porn and sex-saturated commercialism, the departure of America from a
broad Christian consensus on sexual morality is virtually complete.
And just how did both
sides lose? Traditionalists, who
understood that whoever wins the culture wars wins our children, lost partly
because of the stance of public education.
The children of traditionalists had to endure sex ed in middle and high
school unless their parents kept their children out of it. My wife and I chose the latter, which means
our children escaped the central message of secular sex ed: “Be careful, do
certain things and you won’t get pregnant.”
The children of traditionalists,
if they were subjected to sex ed, were taught that sexuality is mere
biology. It’s the facts of life. What do values have to do with it?
Ah, values. How they seem to get in the way of secular
culture. Traditionalists, fighting
Hollywood and the shifting public sentiment, lost because they still believed
that nothing is more values-laden than sexuality, that sexuality is physiology
plus emotions, affection, love, and even trust.
Sex ed, wittingly or not, attaches sexuality to the Darwinian worldview
that men and women evolved from animals, and animals are, well, animalistic,
particularly when it comes to their appetites and sexual urges.
But the revolutionaries
lost also. Whether secular educators,
pornographers, movie makers, Planned Parenthood defenders, abortion
sympathizers, or politicians who cater to all of the above, they all are now caught
in a web of hypocrisy. Freedom from our
Puritanical past was supposed to make us better, certainly happier.
But then along came
Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who proved that we need the old rules
again. Supposedly, the old rules for
sexual relations were outdated and oppressive; yet, who can argue that men have
behaved better under “sexual liberation” than they did under the former
Christian cultural consensus?
The revolutionaries
also lost in that they too must live under the consequences of their own
arguments. For instance, the Center for
Disease Control reports that 4 out of 10 children in the U.S. are born to
unmarried women, and that the spread of STDs is at an all-time high. Apparently, all the condom talk has failed.
Georgian Phil Kent in
his excellent book, “The Dark Side of Liberalism,” writes, “The Dark Side
constantly attacks what is right and true.”
Kent’s timely book echoes John Richard Neuhaus’ claim that the public
square has become the “naked square,” shorn of and now disallowing any mention
of transcendent values.
So here we are. The revolutionaries searched for the soul’s
basement and found it. But Kent’s last
chapter is titled “Where do we go from here?” and his answer is apt: “Fight for
future goals with an optimistic eye and a fearless heart.”
I believe Kent’s optimistic advice is
compelling because I’ve seen the sad eyes of too many youths who have tried the
way of the revolutionaries, “the dark side,” and are ready for something far
more soul-satisfying.
Yes, there is hope. A counter-revolution is still possible, and
it will necessarily be led by parents who refuse to let a sex-sated culture
snatch their children.
Roger Hines
10/10/18
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