The New Morality
The New Morality—Harvesting Its Crop
Its effect on children
TODAY’S sexual revolution is shattering the fabric of society. Old values crumble as Self is enthroned and Me reigns as king. “Do your own thing” is the guiding slogan of the day. Is sex before marriage your thing? Do it! Is it extramarital sex? Do it! Is it homosexuality? Do it! Is it divorce on any whim? Do that too, no matter whom it hurts.
Not everyone by any means subscribes to this litany of the new morality, but the numbers taking up the chant are mushrooming. Books, magazines, movies and television are increasingly preoccupied with sex, much of it involving fornication and adultery. Afternoon shows called “soaps” reek with it, and they now spread like a plague into evening prime time. Supposedly reflecting normal human relationships, such shows are in fact a game of musical beds.
The gay liberation movement pushes to make homosexuality morally acceptable, and when homosexuality and the Bible’s morality become issues in TV shows, it is the Bible’s position that is made to look narrow and stupid—typical examples are the popular series “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H.” TV Guide said homosexuals have become the most effective lobby in television. Major producers and networks consult gay groups before planning programs with gay themes. Far more flagrant, however, is the present escalating invasion of the living room by pornographic cable TV.
Youths are imitative, and they note the examples or role models that adults are providing. What adults do has far more impact than what they say. And that impact is frightening! In the United States one out of every five children has had sexual intercourse by age fourteen. Half have had it before they finish high school. Three out of ten sexually active girls become pregnant. In the United States unwed teenage mothers have 600,000 babies annually, and 9,000 of them are born to girls eleven and under. Added to all of this are unreported pregnancies and those terminated by abortions. A million and a half runaways annually flee their homes to live on the streets, and thousands end up as male or female prostitutes controlled by pimps.
“A basic tenet of modern developmental psychology,” Dr. Sam Janus says in his book The Death of Innocence, “always has been the belief that between infancy and adolescence, sexuality goes underground—becomes ‘latent’—in the interests of psychic and physical growth.” He then observes that this latency period “is a thing of the past, and that our children are going straight from babyhood to puberty as fully sexual beings, with no intermission. The eroticization of children is becoming a fact of life in modern society.”
Janus later elaborates on this loss of childhood: “Gone are the halcyon days when little boys had time to join boys’ clubs, build clubhouses, and play ball. Some, of course, still do but the numbers decline. The same goes for little girls, who once played with dolls and hoped some day their knights in shining armor would come along, marry them, and live happily ever after with them.”
More and more children are being robbed of these years needed for physical, intellectual and emotional growth. Television commercials push kiddie cosmetics—lip gloss, nail polish, powders, perfumes and other like products for girls three to fourteen years of age. Ads for designer jeans show ten-year-olds bumping hips in discotheques. Calvin jeans commercials have Brooke Shields provocatively posed and asking, “What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing!” and “If my Calvins could talk, I’d be ruined.” The experts—psychiatrists, pediatricians, teachers—all agree that preteens are striving to look and act older, reacting to an environment saturated with sex, materialism and drugs. The childhood years are being telescoped, passing too fast too soon, and the child is being cheated out of one of the most delightful periods of life.
One psychologist said: “We dress our children in miniature adult costumes with designer labels, we expose them to gratuitous sex and violence and we expect them to cope with an increasingly bewildering social environment—divorce, single parenthood, homosexuality. Many adolescents feel betrayed by a society that tells them to grow up fast but also to remain childlike.”
The most appalling proof of the decay of values is that there are obscenity laws, but the courts can’t decide what is obscene. Many judges are so busy wringing their hands over freedom of speech and press that they cannot discern the difference between legitimate ideas and opinion on the one hand and obscenity on the other. They cannot see that hard-core pornography, even showing on film or in print small children engaged in sexual acts, is totally without “redeeming social merit.” It’s like saying strychnine in meat must be allowed, since the meat part has “redeeming nutritional value.”
Previous to the new morality there were principles of right and wrong. Now it is the era of permissiveness. Now saying No is the no-no. Now the fad is, ‘Do your own thing. Forget love of neighbor, even if that neighbor is a six-year-old child. Now it’s self-love, all the way!’
The new morality that many extol as liberation is actually exploitation. In The Death of Innocence, Dr. Sam Janus asks: “Has liberation become libertine? Has the vaunted liberation of children turned them into sacrificial lambs on the altar of the sexual revolution?”
There are strong reasons for answering both questions, YES!
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The charge leveled against the Bible’s morality is, It’s not practical. So society has substituted a new morality. Does it pass the test of practicality? Jesus said: “Every good tree produces fine fruit, but every rotten tree produces worthless fruit.” Is its fruit fine or worthless? He also said: “Wisdom is proved righteous by all its children.” Have the “children” of the new morality proved its wisdom to be righteous? (Matthew 7:17; Luke 7:35) This series of articles, “The New Morality—Harvesting Its Crop,” looks at its offspring. The look may shock you, but the publishers feel it’s necessary to alert you to a growing trend in many parts of the world