Raising
Christlike kids in an X-rated world
How
do we help our children navigate the maze of sexual propaganda?
By David
B. Crabtree
“Water, water,
everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” wrote Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in his epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
His haunting tale of a sailing ship running out of drinking water
in the middle of the ocean paints a very modern picture. Our culture
is awash in sexual perversity and disinformation. Sex has become
the foundation of our comedy, our music, our stage and silver
screen. It streams through the afternoon television hours and
gushes into prime time. Sex sells everything from soap to car
insurance. Pornography stalks the Internet. It floods the newsstand.
It leads in the tabloids.
With the rise of secular
humanism the resulting moral vacuum has been filled with a strain
of hedonism that would make Nero blush. A moral sewer surrounds
our families. If we will not protect and guide our children with
God’s truth concerning sexual issues, the culture will gladly
provide them with a degraded sexual context. Sexual information
is everywhere, but truth is hard to find.
The danger for children
is not just indirect, either. Children themselves are increasingly
the targets for sexual exploitation. The stench of pedophilia
is wafting through ever-widening circles of society. Judith Levine,
for example, in her book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of
Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press,
2002) writes: “Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle
to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense
feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest of
children can partake of it.” If what seeps from the academic
world today will pollute the mainstream tomorrow, we are moving
into the opening phase of a sexual “shock and awe”
campaign that promises the complete destruction of our moral base.
Who could imagine a
culture where the sexual exploitation of minors was venerated?
Godless people are imagining such a culture. These people are
not skulking around dark alleyways or hiding out in the seedy
underbelly of the culture. They speak and write under the authority
of earned degrees. They are the shock troops for a new Sodom and
Gomorrah.
Malcolm Muggeridge
captured the present-day insanity when he wrote, “We have
educated ourselves into imbecility.” Indeed, moral bankruptcy
creates the most wicked and deadly ghetto.
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