Throughout history a sexual dichotomy has existed concerning the social acceptance of men and women having sex before marriage and after marriage with partners other than their wives. Many cultures widely accepted and even encouraged young men to “sow their wild oats” with as many women as they wished before marriage, and even afterwards it was, in many western nations, considered a common thing for a man to have a series of mistresses. Among the upper classes in Great Britain, for example, this was especially true. Daughters were to be kept pure and undefiled (and uneducated in what happened in the bedroom) until the day of their marriage. Then, they were expected to provide their husbands with an heir and a spare. Following that, many indulgent husbands, busy with their own mistresses, didn’t care whom their wives carried on with so long as their affairs were discreet. And all the while they, the wives at least, trouped with their servants to church every Sunday where the ministers, supported by that same upper class, probably did not spend much time on scriptures about fornication.
In America, things were a little different. There were few of the upper class from Great Britain here to spread their mores, but rather more of the hard working lower classes who tended to be more faithful to their wives being unable to afford mistresses and being too tired from working to find the time. The Puritans from Massachusetts, with their rigid adherence to the Bible for Christian behavior also influenced the other colonies. In the 1730s and 1740s The Great Awakening, a religious revival, swept not only Great Britain but also the 13 colonies. Soon between 75 and 80 percent of people in the colonies were regularly attending church. The Cane Ridge Camp Meeting in Kentucky began the Second Great Awakening in the new Republic in the early 1800s. The number of Baptists in Kentucky grew that year from 4,700 to 13,500 and Methodist attendance went from 3,000 to 10,000.
As people moved farther west, the churches moved with them, becoming the focal point of the communities. The buildings were used for town meetings, lunches were often held on the grounds after church, and the services themselves served as the high point in a week of toiling on the ground.
But as the decades passed, church attendance began to dwindle as people found other diversions to occupy their time. In the 1950s, however, following WWII and in a period of prosperity, church attendance once again rose from 57 percent of the U.S. population in 1950 to 63.3 percent in 1960. And then the liberals began to assert themselves.
In 1962, schools in the state of New York began each day with the prayer, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.” A group of parents led by Steven Engels, a Jewish man, sued the school board of the Herricks Union Free School District, saying that a prayer to “Almighty God” was unconstitutional because it contradicted their religious beliefs. The Supreme Court in the first of many such liberal decisions, voted 6-1 that the prayer was unconstitutional. In 1963, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an avowed atheist, brought suit on the part of her son, who later became an ardent Christian, to ban Bible reading in public schools. Again the Supreme Court ruled in her favor. (One wonders if it is unconstitutional to read from the Koran in public schools, or writings by Hindu philosophers?) So, by the mid-60s both prayer and the Bible were prohibited in public schools.
The remainder of the 1960s and the 1970s saw the sexual revolution and the burgeoning drug culture. Women, freed from the kitchen by WWII which needed many of them to work in factories or even to fly airplanes from one airfield to another, argued that they should be free to have sex whenever and with whomever they wished, whether they were married or not. And many, influenced by the drugs they were taking, did exactly that. With the removal of prayer and the Bible from public schools, education became more and more secular. Students were no longer taught the 10 commandments. The “Golden Rule” which originates in scripture was largely ignored. Secularism was in control and with it, humanism, which emphasizes the importance of the human over the divine.
Suddenly, parents were taught not to discipline their children by spanking them or by taking away privileges, but rather by reasoning with them, explaining why their behavior was wrong. Corporal punishment disappeared from schools as well, replaced with detention and expulsion, which simply gave misbehaving students a vacation from the classes they didn’t want to attend to begin with. New educational philosophies began to sweep the country. One such philosophy warned of the scars left by failure on a young child and cautioned that everyone should be a winner. So, schools began giving everyone a medal, everyone a trophy, everyone a certificate. Sadly, the adults couldn’t seem to realize that those who had actually excelled and deserved recognition for their achievement were not getting it, and all of the students, even those who had done the most poorly, knew very well that the medals and certificates and trophies meant nothing.
A similar philosophy was Outcome-Based Education which had the wonderful-sounding aim that no one would ever fail. Like all liberal ideas, it sounds great, doesn’t it. But of course the reality is that it doesn’t work. Whether we like it or not, IQs range from the 50s to 200 and occasionally above. The person with the IQ of 50 cannot compete with the individual with the IQ of 200 or even 140 which is considered the score of a genius. We are all different. We all have different skills and different abilities. So, students who didn’t turn in an assignment were given more time and more time. Students who failed a test were retested until they managed, by hook or crook, to pass. No one was allowed to fail. And naturally, instead of helping the poor student to feel successful, it simply helped the smarter student to game the system. Didn’t feel like studying for a test? No problem. You can take it again later, just make sure you failed it for that do-over chance. And the smartest, the most capable, once again felt cheated. Their hard work, their studying, their intellectual ability was rewarded with the same A as the person who took the test multiple times. The strain on teachers of helping the failing not to fail also slowed the progress of the class, leaving the brightest and the best unchallenged and without all of the knowledge they might otherwise have had.
Though we did not realize it at the time, these were all the precursors of the socialism that is being foisted upon the country today by the left and by Democratic Socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Free education for all. A universal healthcare system. A guaranteed salary for every adult, even if he or she doesn’t work. These all sound good, except that first of all, we can never pay for them, not even by bilking the wealthy of all of their money. It would still take considerably higher taxes for the middle class to pay for them even before the wealthy lost their wealth. And do we really believe the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates would calmly continue to live in the U.S. as their money was drained away from them by the government? As Margaret Thatcher once said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” And with the taxes and extra wealth tax that the left is proposing, that would happen all too quickly.
And why this great move by Democratic Socialists? Because it makes the people dependent upon them and guarantees them votes to keep them in power. And why do people fall for it? Because they have forgotten the Biblical foundation upon which this country was founded, grew, and prospered. As it says in Genesis 3:19, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread. . . .” We have always believed that through working hard we could succeed, could find, if not wealth, a comfortable living. And for generations that worked. Until we began to forget God.
Without God, no moral code exists beyond what man may create for himself. My moral code may differ considerably from yours and that is okay. I am as important as you are! And this is where we are in this country now, and unfortunately, in much of the world. Adults are treated like children whose feelings can be hurt by the sight of a cap that reads “Make America Great Again,” words that in any past generation would have stirred the soul and fired up the patriotism of all Americans. Black students must have secure spaces into which white students cannot go and because the sight of white students can sometimes be too overwhelming for them! Students who wanted Hillary Clinton to become president were excused from college exams and given rooms with cuddly teddy bears in which to mourn the election of a Republican president. Media hosts and actors feel free to curse and make fun of the President simply because he is not of their political party. There is no sense of decency anymore.
Without the guidance of “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31), otherwise known as the “Golden Rule,” we have raised a generation of individuals who feel they are the center of the universe. They count and no one else. Their feelings must not be hurt. They must be able to go where they wish and do what they want because what they feel is right is right. There is no set right and wrong.
Thus, homosexuality, which has always been taught by the Bible as a sin, is now being forced upon Americans as something very natural, despite the fact that it is in fact very unnatural. Marriage, which for millennia has been understood to be between a man and a woman (“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” Genesis 2:24) is now extended to members of the same sex because liberal Justices on the Supreme Court determined that marriage could be between members of the same sex. Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, admitted, “There are untold references to the beauty of marriage in religious and philosophical texts spanning time, cultures, and faiths, as well as in art and literature in all their forms. It is fair and necessary to say these references were based on the understanding that marriage is a union between two persons of the opposite sex.” But, the Justices would have it that religious guidelines no longer apply to modern times and situations. Forget God. Give the people what they want!
And what they want is more freedom from restraints of any kind. Individuals, who hate their bodies because they were sexually abused as children, have sometimes turned to transgenderism as an answer. Despite the DNA which still determines they are the female or male that they were born, they have taken hormones to help them appear to be members of the opposite sex. That this is unnatural is without question since the newly minted transgender women can not become pregnant and carry a child because they have no uterus, and the emotional and psychological problems for a transgender man who still has ovaries and a uterus to become pregnant and carry a child to delivery are so immense as to make it highly undesirable.
In addition, when a magazine has to chide men for not wanting to date “women with penises” it is obvious that something truly unnatural is going on. Yet, parents of pre-school age boys who play with dolls or little girls who play with trucks, have started them on transgender hormones. And they are not doing their children a favor. Studies in recent years have shown a higher rate of suicide attempts among the LGBT community. But a godless society has no boundaries.
And so in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was legal throughout the country and liberals were ecstatic! Now a woman could have sex as often as she wished and if she she got pregnant, she could simply have an abortion! Sex became not a deep expression of love and trust between a husband and wife, but the simple gratification of a sexual itch, the dessert course after a dinner date. Young women in cities like New York and Los Angeles may now have multiple sexual partners, casual acquaintances they have made in a bar or night club, one-night stands as we used to call them. And birth control pills, the morning after pill, and especially abortion make it all possible, especially for the busy working woman who just might forget to take those pills!
So the liberal left has pushed abortion harder and harder, calling it “women’s reproductive rights” and “women’s health issues” as if having a baby were an illness, (ignoring the man who contributed half of the baby’s DNA) until in the past couple of weeks they revealed what they really want. In New York state, the legislature passed a bill which Democratic Governor Cuomo signed into law which permits a woman to abort a baby any time after 24 weeks (babies have survived outside of the womb as early as 20 weeks) as long as a healthcare practitioner determines that the health or life of the mother is at risk. It also removes the death of an unborn, late-term baby from the penal code. Health, could be determined to mean “mental health,” so that a late-term baby could be killed if a doctor could be found to agree it would be best for the mother’s mental health.
The Virginia legislature tried to go even farther. They attempted to pass a law allowing abortions up until the moment of delivery. In fact, Democratic Governor Ralph Northam explained, that if a child were born alive, it would be kept comfortable while the mother and the doctor determined whether the baby was to be allowed to live or whether it should be murdered. Luckily, the law did not pass, but the implications are enormous. We are already one of only seven nations in the world which allow babies to be aborted after 20 weeks. Do we really want to become a nation that allows infanticide? Apparently Democrats believe that we do, since Democratic Senator Patty Murray from the state of Washington blocked the Senate from passing an anti-infanticide vote. When you do not believe in God, there is no sanctity of life.
Only 38% of Americans regularly attend church today with another 10% attending about once a month. If we continue to lose our belief in God, our country will continue to sink into the abyss of barbarism and sexual aberrations. As Solomon wrote in Proverbs 28:13,“Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”