Warning: Reader Discretion is Advised

Leftists do not seek only to destroy, divide, cancel, and erase. They seek also to re-fashion a brave new world. A look at two recent cultural events reveals the kind of world with which leftists hope to replace cancelled America.

The most recent was Sunday’s Super Bowl during which a vulgar man/boy who calls himself the Weekend performed his song “Earn It” which is a paean to sadomasochism written for the softcore porn movie Fifty Shades of Grey which was based on the twisted softcore porn bodice ripper Fifty Shades of Grey. In the name of “equity,” leftists want to get women as addicted to porn as men are.

An official video of “Earn It” available on YouTube for every man, woman, and child to view consists of the man/boy Weekend, leering creepily at half a dozen women wearing only pasties and thongs with big black Xs on their buttocks who gyrate sexually while carrying the accouterments of sadomasochism. Google, which cancels conservative ideas and which owns YouTube, finds nothing troubling at all about providing a platform for a softcore porn video that objectifies and exploits women—i.e., adult female humans.

Sanctimonious leftists continually preach sermons about which ideas must be cancelled because they’re destructive and immoral. Apparently, those leftists think the Weekend is wholly undeserving of cancellation, because he never says anything destructive or immoral.

Unlike the destructive act of saying men can’t become women or saying the union of two people of the same sex can never be a marriage, porn and sadomasochism never hurt women, children, or families—or so leftists claim. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of the Weekend’s “songs” that, presumably, leftists think is healthy and good for America:

I think I’ve finally fell in love now

Her name is Tammy, she got hella bitches

She let me f*ck ’em while my ni**as film it …

…

Girl go ’head and show me how you go down

And I feel my whole body peakin’

And I’m f*ckin’ anybody with they legs wide

Got me higher than a ni**ga from the West Side

If anyone affirms sexual deviance, and the abuse, exploitation, and objectification of women, the left will definitely not cancel them. Instead, sexual libertines will be given the most colossal platforms leftists can find. And leftist ideological tyrants make sure those platforms are ones that children can access.

The second cultural event took place just two days before the Super Bowl when LA Times and Wired Magazine writer Virginia Heffernan wrote a condescending column in which she argues that even acts of unselfish generosity on the parts of Trump voters require nothing more than a begrudging smidge of appreciation. She defends her bitter intolerance as a legitimate response for the indefensible sin of voting for Trump:

The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks—and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro—but how much thanks?

Heffernan’s answer is suggested in her question. She plans to respond minimally:

[w]ith a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.

But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.

Absolution? What arrogant audacity to imply 74 million Americans need absolution for voting their consciences; for voting to try to protect their children’s economic futures; for voting to protect the jobs of those in the energy sector; for voting to preserve energy independence; for voting to secure our borders in the same way other countries secure their borders; for voting to protect our children from indoctrination with leftist sexuality beliefs and Critical Race Theory;  for voting to protect our children from having to undress in the presence of peers of the opposite sex; for voting to protect the First and Second Amendments; and for voting to protect the lives of humans in the womb.

In the grimy hands and bendy minds of oily leftists, justice and truth are slippery concepts. Many Trump voters think, for example, that men can’t be women, and that falsifying birth certificates or referring to “Caitlyn” Jenner by female pronouns are acts of lying. And many Trump voters believe allowing biological men—also known as men—to compete in women’s sports is manifestly—or womanifestly—unjust.

Heffernan is right on one point, though. Absolution isn’t hers to give, and Trump voters owe her nothing. If attempts to “make amends” and to work for “justice”—as defined by leftists—are “unity” prerequisites, then there will be no unity in America. But we already knew that.

After comparing Trump voters to Hezbollah, Louis Farrakhan, and Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain, Heffernan said this:

What do we do about the Trumpites around us? … Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we’ve even stitched up our wounds. Or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.

My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans.

Are the 74 million Trump voters expected to forgive and forget the leftists who showed near murderous contempt for all the Americans who lived in terror as their cities and businesses were burned and looted, and police officers spit at and beaten?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget before they’ve even stitched their lives back together?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget the shabby way President Trump and Melania Trump were treated by the bigoted, partisan press since the moment President Trump was elected?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget the millions of tax dollars spent on the Russian collusion hoax and two impeachment trials—including the one that Chief Justice John Roberts refuses to preside over?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget the way Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh was treated by Democrats?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget the way the press covered for the corrupt Joe Biden during his invisible campaign?

Are Trump voters expected to forgive and forget that leftists have given Trump little to no credit for Operation Warp Speed?

Apparently, leftists have little understanding that Trump voters view the beliefs of leftists—particularly on matters pertaining to sexuality and marriage—as evil and destructive as leftists view conservative beliefs.

Leftists that control Big Tech, big business, our professional medical and mental health organizations, public schools, secondary schools, the mainstream press, and the “arts,” do not support diversity of ideas. They do not value tolerance for beliefs they hate. They do not love liberty for deplorables, ugly folks, and theologically orthodox Christians.

And despite all their prior opposition to “imposing morality,” leftists are now firmly committed to imposing their morality—including on other people’s children using taxpayer money.

The beauty of America used to be that, recognizing the diversity of ideas and beliefs, Americans were committed to allowing the free flow of ideas and robust debate. The notion that a ruling class could declare that their presuppositions would enjoy unencumbered public expression and that all dissenting views would be banned was unthinkable.

It was this freedom that made America a refuge for oppressed people around the world, and as leftists deracinate this freedom, America becomes an oppressive place to live for millions of Americans. Increasingly, the only freedom valued by those who rule America is the freedom for unrestrained sexual deviance to destroy hearts, minds, bodies, souls, families, churches, and the First Amendment.

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The release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie is a more important and lamentable event than many Christians may realize. What the movie represents is nothing less than the evolution of pornography in an age increasingly distant from a biblical vision of sexuality and human dignity.

One of the hallmarks of the Christian worldview is an affirmation of the unity of the transcendentals — the good, the beautiful, and the true. Christianity affirms — and demands — that the good, the beautiful, and the true are actually one, unified in their source. The source of what is good, beautiful, and true is none other than God himself, who alone is infinitely good, beautiful, and true. Our very knowledge of beauty, goodness, and truth are due to God’s gifts of revelation and creation. He defines the good, the true, and the beautiful by his being, and they are unified in him.

This means that Christians believe the radical truth that nothing good can be ugly, that nothing untrue can be beautiful, and that everything beautiful and true is also good.

To attempt a separation of the good, the true, and the beautiful is, by Christian understanding, both impossible and self-defeating. Furthermore, the attempt to separate them is sinful — an act of defiance.

For this reason the Christian worldview insists that the face of a child with Down syndrome is infinitely more beautiful than an airbrushed model on the cover of a fashion magazine. The model may be pretty, but every human being is beautiful, simply by virtue of being made in the image of God. That grounding of human dignity points to the fact of our creation by a loving and merciful God, who made us in his image, and revealed this truth in our very existence and in our capacity to know him. He revealed this truth explicitly in Holy Scripture, and this means that every single human being, at every stage of development, possesses full human dignity.

The corruption of the gift of sex is, more than often realized, an assault upon that human dignity that is the Creator’s gift. The attempt to declare beauty at the expense of goodness and truth is at the heart of the problem of pornography. Now, we live in a society fast losing even a sense of shame about its pornographic obsessions.

The explosive sales of the Fifty Shades book series alerted many Christians to the fact of female-oriented pornography. While far more attention had been devoted to the visual nature of most male-oriented pornography, the Fifty Shades phenomenon underlined the public mainstreaming of pornography that would find a primary audience among women — narrative pornography in book form.

While many had noted the attraction of so-called “romance novels” to many women, the arrival of the Fifty Shades series announced that the culture at large was ready to shift to what can only be described as explicitly pornographic. Furthermore, the plot line of the series, now quite well known in the larger society, is devoted to forms of sexuality that had historically been defined as perverse and abusive.

The lost sense of shame is not only documented in the unprecedented sales of the series in book form, but also by the mainstream celebration of the movie.

A culture that is determined to reduce all sexual morality to the issue of adult consent is now ready to eat popcorn while watching the corruption of the gift of sex and, in effect, granting approval to the vision of sexuality that is the film’s very essence.

This next stage in the evolution of pornography combines, in an unprecedented way, male-oriented visual pornography with female-oriented narrative pornography. The movie is being marketed on Valentine’s Day as an adventure for couples — something offered to both men and women.

That something is a lie. The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan spoke of our tendency to “define deviancy down.” That is one of the marks of our age. The Fifty Shades movie will not be legally defined as obscenity or pornography. In our age, almost nothing is. But biblically speaking, there can be no question about the fact that the Fifty Shades phenomenon is explicitly pornographic — defined in the New Testament by the Greek word porneia — which refers directly to any illicit sexual impulse or act. Pornography, whatever its form, is intended to produce that wrongful sexual impulse.

Going to see Fifty Shades of Grey, or reading the book series, is an exercise in pornographic intent and effect. It is also an act of defiance against the goodness of the gift of sex as granted to humanity by God. Furthermore, the series is an assault upon the dignity of every human being.

The loss of shame in modern society is championed as a sign of cultural progress in many circles and as a step forward in mental health by many therapists. More than anything else, however, it points to the depth of the confusion that inevitably accompanies the corruption of God’s gifts.

Christianity celebrates the unity of the good, the beautiful, and the true in God himself. In obedience, we must seek to unify the true and the beautiful and the good in our hearts and minds — and in our bodies.

Words from the Book of Common Prayer‘s service of Holy Matrimony will serve us well here. Christians know that the good, the true, and the beautiful are always and evermore united. What God has joined together, let no one tear asunder.

This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com website.

Written By Dewayne Hamby

When a big-screen faith-based romance hits the screen the same weekend as the highly-anticipated adaptation of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, it could be coincidence. But probably not. More than likely, it’s clever counter-programming that Hollywood types have done before, such as offering a new family feature on a date when an R-rated raunchy comedy opens.

Old Fashioned is the polar opposite of Fifty Shades, which should interest not only Christian audiences, but also perhaps anyone hesitant to subject themselves and loved ones to a big screen glorification of sadomasochism. In all actuality, this programming choice is putting love in a side-by-side contest with lust.

Old Fashioned is the story of Clay Walsh (played by the film’s writer/director/producer Rik Swartzwelder), an antiques dealer who is shy, guarded and moralistic. When a new girl, Amber Hewson (Elizabeth Ann Roberts) arrives in his small Midwestern town, she’s intrigued by his faith in God and his convictions.

Through the story, the film reveals the flaws of both characters and the emotional healing they can provide to each other.

The story may sound familiar but the film offers well-developed characters and a charming, compelling story. Walsh delivers some of the film’s best lessons, both through his spoken convictions and his backstory, which offers a glimpse of how he arrived at them.

Because of those convictions, Walsh has to make some hard choices, such as not being alone with a single woman or even walking out on a bachelor party offered for one of his friends. These are real-life dilemmas and it’s refreshing to find a main character in a film choosing the high road. In Old Fashioned, younger viewers will find a solid but counter-cultural approach to romance with principles that will help them avoid their own mistakes. Older ones will enjoy seeing romance kindled in the lives of the likable main characters.

If Old Fashioned is to be judged simply as a movie alone, it would pass the test. It is well-produced, well-acted and well-written. However, as a player in a cultural standoff, like “David and Goliath” as Swartzwelder has proclaimed, it serves a much bigger purpose—to show the world it doesn’t have to follow the road of self-gratification. Like God’s Not Dead or Left Behind, even a moderately successful run will send shock waves through the culture. It’s definitely a movie—and a cause—worth getting behind.

Playing this weekend in Machesney Park, South Barrington and Warrenville.  Click HERE for details.

Originally Published at CharismaNews.com.

Sometimes we’re able to float through life blissfully unaware of the offal that the television, movie, cable, and video-streaming industries feed the culture. Often, we have a remarkable capacity for ingesting it and ignoring the vomit that results from ingesting offal. Other times, the stench from the offal and the vomit are just too much. That’s what’s happened to me.

The first outrage was hearing that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams regularly watches his own daughter, Allison Williams, who is an actress on the vulgar HBO program Girls. In a recent episode, there was a brief scene in which a young man performs a sex act on her which I can’t describe in even general terms in this article. When questioned, her father offered this silly dismissal of his peculiar TV viewing habit:

She’s always been an actress. For us, watching her is the family occupation and everybody has to remember it’s acting, no animals were harmed during the filming, and ideally nobody gets hurt.

Then, last week, I learned that ABC is producing a sitcom based on the life of nasty, brutish, obscene sex columnist (and Chicago native) Dan Savage. This is the man who at a journalism conference for high school students insulted Christians and then, like a middle-school bully, hurled the anti-“gay” epithet “pansies” at those students who walked out. At a college speaking engagement, the savage Savage described conservative Christians as bat sh*t, a*sh*le, dou**ebags. And in his columns and on college tours, he cheerfully endorses threesomes and sexual practices that involve excrement.

The proverbial last straw that led to this article came yesterday when I was made aware that the puerile hosts of the Today Show are spending two entire weeks tittering about and promoting Fifty Shades of Grey, the softcore porn movie based on the hardcore porn novel. Yes, some will argue that because everything is relative and there are far more sexually explicit novels, Fifty Shades of Grey is not hardcore porn. But I joyfully reject the false belief that everything is relative and, therefore, I feel no compunction about describing Fifty Shades of Grey as hardcore porn.

For those who have been living on a compound in a cave on a remote island, Fifty Shades of Grey is the novelistic offal that extols the wonders of “bondage and discipline,” sadism, and masochism (BDSM) that child-women have been devouring. The stars are Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and Jamie Dornan, a married Irish actor and father of a baby girl.

Here are some of the profoundly sad comments Dakota Johnson made in a CNN interview:

It’s stressful enough to be tied to a bed naked in a scene. But then they call cut, and you’re still tied to the bed, naked. Jamie would be the first one to throw a blanket over me….I don’t want my family to see [the movie], because it’s inappropriate. Or my brothers’ friends, who I grew up with.

Dakota Johnson’s response reveals the incoherence of her belief system: While recognizing the truth that there are things regarding her body that her family shouldn’t see, she fails to recognize that the world should not see these things either.

Whether actors realize it or not, the belief that the profession of acting renders nudity and erotic interactions with acquaintances morally justifiable reflects the human tendency toward Gnosticism. Gnosticism holds a dim view of materiality including physical embodiment and seeks to sever the inseverable link between body and spirit. Peter Burfeind explains how Gnostic thought shapes the prevailing cultural view of the body:

[T]he Gnostic reading of humanity…says the Self has nothing to do with the physical body, but rather the body is nothing more than vesture to be tailored any way one wants.

It’s all rooted in the narrative of one’s “Self” being liberated from the stifling oppression of the body and its various determinations…, rooted in the Gnostic notion that life is the story of the Self’s liberation from (or reconstituting of)…bodily realities in order to pursue the heroic journey of Self-divinization.

Nudity and erotic interactions always have meaning, which is why nudity and erotic interactions in theatrical performances are wrong. The body cannot be separated from the spirit. One can portray  another character through language, costuming, and movement, but one cannot be so wholly transformed that nudity and erotic interactions become the acts of someone else. In Dakota Johnson’s desire to be covered immediately after filming a sex scene and her desire that her family and brothers’ friends not see her movie, she apprehends something true that evidently escapes Brian Williams.

In the CNN interview, Jamie Dornan revealed the challenges of doing the BDSM scenes:

Some of the Red Room stuff was uncomfortable. There were times when Dakota was not wearing much, and I had to do stuff to her that I’d never choose to do to a woman.

A man of integrity would refuse to be in a room with an unclothed woman, doing dishonorable things to her. Claiming the mantle of actor does not render Dornan’s actions honorable. Dakota Johnson, the young woman, was in reality unclothed and Dornan did dishonorable things to her—not to a character—but to her. And worse still, he did them so that the whole world could see.

If nudity is morally defensible as long as one is acting, and if touching what we tell our children are “private parts” of someone with whom you have no intimate relationship is morally defensible as long as one is acting, then would it be morally defensible for Don Johnson to have acted with his daughter in the Jamie Dornan role? If not, why not?

Dakota Johnson reveals too an impoverished view of female empowerment:

[I]f I can be an advocate for women to do what they want with their bodies and not be ashamed of what they want, then I’m all for that.

Female flourishing and freedom do not come from unfettered bodily autonomy but from knowing and doing the will of God. And God does not desire that women engage in sexual acts that degrade and inflict pain on them with men to whom they are not married. Nor does God desire that actresses perform in movies or plays that call for them to be unclothed or touched intimately by men. While Fifty Shades of Grey seeks to depict liberation through titillating, boundary-pushing imagery, in reality, it serves to enslave women in the same sexual grip that has historically enslaved only men.

The Today Show is contributing to the cultural hyperventilation about this tacky movie made from a poorly written, tacky book by showing clips from the movie every day this week, having an advance showing for fans, hosting a contest in which fans are asked to write captions for different scenes, and inviting actors to the show to discuss the movie.

So far, not one guest has been invited to discuss seriously the meaning and effect of this cultural phenomenon on an understanding of sexuality and human flourishing. No discussion thus far of the gnostic aspects that appearing in such a movie signifies. No expressions of sadness about the debasement of women that the movie both reflects and encourages. No shame that teens may be ingesting this offal.

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