America was very far from perfect in the early 1960s. In much of the nation segregation was the law of the land and women certainly had far less opportunities than men, just to mention two of society’s inequities. And I’m quite aware the first issue of Playboy, featuring Marilyn Monroe in the nude, was published in 1953. At the same time, there’s no denying that America back then was a far more innocent, family friendly country than it is today.

And so, 55 years ago, when we sat together and watched Leave It to Beaver, we didn’t say to ourselves, “How corny! There’s not a family in the nation like the Cleavers.” Instead, it was as normal to us as it was entertaining.

In a word, Americans in the late-1950s to early-1960s enjoyed watching Father Knows Best and The Andy Griffith Show. Today we enjoy watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Secret Diary of a Call Girl. (For the record, in contrast with Bruce-Caitlyn Jenner, the patriarch of the Kardashian family, Robert Young, who played the father on Father Knows Best, was never crowned “woman of the year.”)

In the late-50s to early-60s, Annette Funicello was a popular, young female star singing songs like “Pineapple Princes.” Today it’s Miley Cyrus, singing songs like “Wrecking Ball” – in the nude, riding a wrecking ball, on her music video.

Take an old show like Dennis the Menace, which aired from 1959-1963, and think of some of the things he got in trouble for. (After all, he was called a “menace,” right?) In the first episode, “Dennis successfully eludes a babysitter (whom he has never met) and sneaks out of the house and goes to a cowboy movie that his parents also go to while [his friend] Joey is left with the babysitter, pretending to be Dennis.” In the next episode, “Dennis and [his closest friend] Tommy replace a fallen street signpost but fail to notice they’ve put it up with the street names facing in the wrong direction.” Oh, what a menace!

Today, we would be following Dennis’s journey on reality TV, waiting for him to get out of the juvenile detention center after robbing an elderly man in broad daylight. Will Dennis ever change, or will he end up dead before his eighteenth birthday? And rather than Dennis having that old scruffy hairdo with that shock of blond locks always out of place he would be sporting a purple Mohawk, wearing earrings, an eyebrow ring, a lip ring, and adorned with tattoos galore. (If you think I’m exaggerating, watch some clips from Beyond Scared Straight.)

Or consider that on I Love Lucy, Lucy and her husband slept in separate beds. Could you imagine today’s version, where the show would feature partial nudity (after all, it’s a family show, so there has to be some modesty), mild profanity, constant sexual innuendos, and kids who do not show the slightest respect to their parents?

Or compare Andy Griffith to Stalker or Hannibal, or compare Lawrence Welk to the annual MTV Music Awards. Or watch an old Elvis movie where he shakes his hips – that was so controversial – and compare that to the latest crotch-grabbing, bootie shaking music video (those have been around for quite some time now). And be sure to compare the lyrics too!

If you’re a young person reading this and you’re not familiar with the older shows, take a few minutes to watch some of the episodes. They’re readily available on YouTube, and you’ll be amazed by what you see.

Watch an episode of Lassie, then switch over to American Horror Story, or compare West Side Story to Natural Born Killers. Then go back to The Flintstones cartoon show – remember, we would watch this together as a family – and compare it to today’s animated shows like South Park or Adult Swim. (By the way, if you say, “I’d rather pass on watching these newer shows,” you won’t get an argument from me.)

Recently, Matthew Walther, a national correspondent for The Week, wrote, “I used to watch Game of Thrones. Then I realized it was endangering my immortal soul.”

He came to this conclusion six-years (and six-seasons) late, but a recent episode jarred him into reality. “My goodness,” he thought to himself. “I’ve just spent an hour watching to see if a guy who raped a teenage girl at bow-and-arrow point is going to be eaten alive by the animals he has spent the last few seasons subjecting to forms of cruelty that make Michael Vick look like a PETA ambassador or beaten to death in the freezing cold by his victim’s half-brother. Thank goodness the guy who set his terminally ill daughter on fire in a pyromantic oblation to a heathen god at the behest of a witch who never seems to wear any clothes is not around to prevent justice from being carried out here — the woman whose size makes her the frequent butt of bestiality-related jokes killed him just in time!”

And on and on his description goes, more lurid by the line. The contrast between this and Lassie is the contrast between America today and America when I was a boy. The question is: Can America be saved? Is there any way to recover some of the innocence we have lost? I say the answer is Yes, and I believe that there is a prescription for radical change laid out in the pages of Scripture itself.

That’s the subject of my new book Saving a Sick America: A Prescription for Moral and Cultural Transformation (due out in September). You can download the first chapter of this book, from which much of this article has been adapted, for free, here. You can also watch the book trailer there as well.

Things are indeed dire, but not all hope is lost. The question is: Do we sense the urgency of the hour?

Article originally posted on Townhall.com.

“Foolish: lacking good sense or judgment; unwise”

The Chicago Tribune must have an expansive anti-discrimination hiring policy that prohibits discrimination based on foolishness because the paper hires a boatload of foolish writers. The feckless Trib writer ‘o’ the week is sports writer Steve Rosenbloom who penned an embarrassing piece about the admired football coach Tony Dungy.  To be clear, it is Rosenbloom—not Dungy—who should be embarrassed.

Rosenbloom was in high self-righteous dudgeon over what Dungy said when asked if he would have drafted openly homosexual NFL player Michael Sam. Dungy replied, “I wouldn’t have taken him. Not because I don’t believe Michael Sam should have a chance to play, but I wouldn’t want to deal with all of it.”

If Rosenbloom had taken a deep breath and done some research, he would have discovered that the “it” in Dungy’s statement, which has caused such moral indignation among the “tolerant,” did not refer to  Sam’s sexual predilections. Rather, “it” referred to the distraction of the media circus that is following Sam, including a now-postponed reality television program for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

Yes, Dungy wanted to avoid the very distraction that led Sam himself to postpone his reality show. In a May 16 statement, Sam’s agent Cameron Weiss said that an agreement had been reached with the OWN network to postpone the show in order “to ensure no distractions to his teammates.”

Rosenbloom’s presumptuous and error-ridden editorial beckons for a smidge of rebuttal—that is, a small rebuttal to small-minded, superficial thoughts common to the Left.

First, Rosenbloom compares Michael Sam to convicted dog-fighter Michael Vick, claiming that in Dungy’s world, “a man who wants to love another man is worse than a man who supports killing dogs for sport.”

Well, if by Dungy’s “world,” Rosenbloom means orthodox, historic Christendom, he’s wrong. Orthodox Christians have no opposition whatsoever to men loving men. In fact, orthodox Christians deeply treasure loving relationships between men. What orthodox Christians believe is wrong is sexual activity between men which corrupts their love for one another.

Rosenbloom then asks the rhetorical question, “Wasn’t [America] founded on equality?”

Such a free-floating, ambiguous, decontextualized rhetorical question is at best meaningless, at worst devious. The equality our Founding Fathers sought to enshrine in both our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (which “progressives” re-imagine when its original intent doesn’t suit their fancy) had nothing to do with the protean sexual impulses of constitutionally sinful humans. The equality they valued was political equality based on universal, non-behavioral human traits.

Equality demands that we treat like things alike. Homoerotic activity and relationships are neither ontologically nor morally the same as heterosexual activity and relationships. And unions between two people of the same sex are not the same as sexually complementary unions. The belief that they are ontologically the same is objectively false, and the belief that they’re morally the same is an erroneous assumption—not a fact.

No unmarried adult is denied the right to marry. Homosexuals are not demanding the right to marry. They are demanding the unilateral “right” to redefine marriage by jettisoning the most enduring, cross-cultural marital feature. And it is a re-definitional “right,” by the way, that polyamorists, close blood relatives, and “minor-attracted” persons do not enjoy. Being prohibited from unilaterally redefining marriage to suit their desires does not mean homosexuals are prohibited from marrying.

Rosenbloom continues, describing Dungy’s view that marriage is an institution composed of one man and one woman as “sad” and  “unevolved.” Rosenbloom argues that the belief that sexual differentiation is inherent to marriage “downgrades” those who want their homoerotic unions to be recognized legally as marriages. Does Rosenbloom think that the view that marriage is a union of only two people “downgrades” polyamorists?  Does America’s valuation of equality demand that our conceptualization of marriage further evolve to allow the legalization of plural marriages?

And finally, what Leftist anti-marriage, anti-Christ screed would be complete without the inclusion of the old homosexuality=race saw. Rosenbloom asks,  “What if late, great Steelers coach Chuck Noll had not wanted what he thought might be the distraction of hiring a black assistant coach many decades ago?” To reiterate, Dungy did not view Sam’s aberrant sexual feelings as the distraction. Moreover, race (or skin color) per se is not analogous to sexual attraction. Now, racism and homoeroticism do share something in common. Human sin and lousy biblical exegesis resulted in both the cultural embrace of racism and the current cultural embrace of homoerotic identity politics.

The two titles given to Rosenbloom’s editorial aptly convey both Rosenbloom’s ignorance and the ignorance of the “progressive” sexuality dogma that infects so many in the arts, academia, and the mainstream press in America:

Print version title: “Dungy’s hypocrisy biggest distraction”

Online version: “Tony Dungy’s sad, embarrassing world”

Remember these titles next time someone accuses conservatives of being judgmental. Remember too that Christians are commanded to “Judge with righteous judgment.” Righteous judgment—or properly ordered discrimination between right and wrong—is judgment that aligns with biblical truth. All truth is God’s truth, and truth, like God’s nature, does not evolve—not even to accommodate human desire.

It would behoove “progressives” to read a little less from mainstream journalists and a little more from the great American writer Flannery O’Connor who wrote this in a letter to Betty Hester:

But I can never agree with you that…truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right….It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline….[T]he very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist…. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Tony Dungy’s views on marriage are views shared by countless Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant,  and Jewish scholars working in prestigious colleges, universities, and seminaries today (not to mention throughout history).  These women and men believe that homoerotic activity is immoral, that it effaces the image of God written on human beings, and that it undermines human flourishing. To affirm such activity would constitute a profoundly unloving act. No loving person affirms that which puts at risk the temporal and eternal lives of others.

These scholars are men and women recognized for their academic accomplishments and their civil treatment of others, including those with whom they disagree on homoerotic activity and marriage. How is it possible that “progressives” look at the lives of men and women like Ryan Anderson, Hadley Arkes, Michael Brown, J. Budziszewki, Anthony Esolen, John Finnis, Robert Gagnon, Robert George, Sherif Girgis , Vigen Guroian, David Bentley Hart, Peter Leithart, Russell Moore, Francesca Aran Murphy, David Novak, Michael Novak, John Piper, Alexander Pruss, R. Reno, Elizabeth Scalia, Andrew Wilson, Doug Wilson, and N.T. Wright—scholars all—and claim that they are ignorant, hateful bigots? It defies reason and evidence to suggest that all these scholars and the scores of others who share their views are motivated by ignorance, stupidity, or blind hatred.

But it’s clear that the Left is not motivated by a desire for truth, nor constrained by lack of evidence. Toss in a few cliché shibboleths like “equality” and “homophobia,” and they win the demagogic battle for the hearts of unthinking Americans who love nothing so much as being part of the cool group.

Stand with Illinois Family Institute!