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Fifty years ago, lasciviousness, adultery, and fornication, were almost universally deemed reprehensible; they hardly raise an eyebrow anymore. New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer, was forced to resign in 2008 for patronizing prostitutes. CNN rewarded him with a TV contract in 2010. New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, was forced to resign his seat in June 2011. He initially denied his involvement in a “sexting” scandal, but then admitted his guilt. His fellow Democrats appeared more incensed that he was caught in a lie than that he was involved in moral turpitude.
Millions of couples “live together” without marriage, often producing children. Sexual “freedom” dominates the entertainment industry. Readily available pornography is a multi-billion dollar business annually. America seems obsessed with flaunting what was once the most personal, private, and intimate relationship possible between a man and a woman.
The 1960s “sexual revolution” occurred long enough ago for us to observe some causes and effects. Consider some factors behind the abandonment of previous national moral standards:
- Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859) undermined the basis of Biblical/Christian morality. Darwinism allowed men to replicate the “morals” of animals, since, after all, men are only advanced apes.
- Modernism (that viewed the Bible as a product of uninspired literary evolution) captured many theological schools a century ago, which began producing faithless pulpiteers. The more they maligned the Bible, the more Biblical morality declined. By mid-century these influences were affecting the moral fiber of a nation that was founded upon the Bible as God’s moral standard.
- Alfred Charles Kinsey, posing as a “biological researcher” in mid-20th-century, published his books on male and female human sexual behavior. He has since been unmasked as a fraud in his “research,” but also as an obsessive sexual pervert, hiding behind an academic façade to enact his own fantasies. He helped move sexual engagement from marriage to anywhere, with anybody, anytime. Many call him “the father of the sexual revolution” for good reasons.
- Millions of young post-World War II parents heeded the anti-discipline, instant-gratification advice for child rearing of the radical leftist pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. Many such children reached their late teens in the mid-1960s, ripe for such hard-core radicals as Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Bill Ayers (Mr. Obama’s Chicago friend). The aim of such feckless punks was societal chaos and violence sufficient to overthrow civil order, including moral standards. President Clinton’s infamous dalliances reflected those influences.
- Hugh Hefner introduced his “playboy philosophy” and magazine mid-20th century, paving the way for public tolerance of pornography and its frequent offspring, fornication.
- Bible reading and prayer in public schools were outlawed by a 1962 Supreme Court ruling. In 1963, “values-neutral” sex education courses began appearing in high schools, teaching the fundamentals of “safe” sexual performance, but no fundamentals on sexual parameters. (Even a show-window mannequin could predict the outcome of that emphasis swing.)
- Social, theological, and political liberals preached tolerance, non-judgmentalism, and political correctness as sexual mores crumbled.
- The 1960s brought dramatic relaxation of standards in the entertainment industry. Scenes, words, and themes, formerly taboo in movies, began appearing, many of them involving sex. Rock and roll song lyrics followed suit. Television was bound to tag along. Since the mid-1970s TV has been characterized by ever-increasing sexual titillation, leaving little—sometimes nothing—to the imagination.
- The 1960s “no-fault” divorce laws mitigated the seriousness of adultery, making it convenient for spouses with short memories of their wedding vows to betray them.
- The Internet has made pornography and dates for fornication only a click of one’s computer mouse away.
- The American Civil Liberties Union was/is a major force in defending the grossest forms of wantonness while fighting Biblical influence on every hand.
These and other factors have produced vastly more than a few individual Weiners, Spitzers, Edwardses, and Clintons—they have truly wrought a revolution in American morals:
- Sex has been degraded, devalued, and dirtied. The sexual union has become casual recreation to millions with no more shame, mystery, or privacy attached to it than a game of “Trivial Pursuit.”
- God-ordained marriage, home, and family—the foundation of civil society—have suffered great damage, not the least of which has been the legalization of same-sex “marriage.”
- Divorces, teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have skyrocketed (infecting one in five Americans). STDs are all but nonexistent among those who remain chaste until marriage and who remain faithful to their wedding vows.
- The sexual revolution helped produce the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, making it “open season” on innocent life in the womb. Abortion is a common (and barbaric) means of birth control—the ultimate “safety net” for the “affair” and “one night stand” players.
- Relaxation of heterosexual mores has given opportunity for homosexuals to make great strides in their crusade to earn general acceptance for their deviances, including “marriage,” as mentioned above.
This list, though not exhaustive, reveals a rotting, decaying culture. The ultimate consequence is even more drastic. The Bible says: “Let marriage be had in honor among all, and let the bed be undefiled: for fornicators and adulterers God will judge” (Heb. 13:4). Only in God-authorized marriage (Mat. 19:6) do we find the honorable and undefiled place for “the bed” (i.e., fulfillment of the God-given sexual appetite). It is defiled in all other settings, constituting fornication and/or adultery. Those who take these sins to the Judgment will receive God’s just condemnation (Rev. 21:8; 22:14–15).
How can we reclaim the moral standards our nation honored in the past?
- Consistently live and promote Biblical morals (abandoning them produced the problem)
- Vote for candidates who have high moral standards
- Encourage elected officials to promote morality “at the top”
Some 3,500 years ago, Solomon wrote: “Righteousness exalteth a nation; But sin is a reproach to any people” (Pro. 14:34). How greatly reproached our beloved nation is when judged by this inspired rule.
[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in three parts in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, TX, June 17, 24, and July 1, 2016.]
Attribution: Printed from TheScripturecache.com, owned and administered by Dub McClish.
