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.

Let’s see, Planned Parenthood provides age-inappropriate, Leftist dogma packaged as sex “education” to children and kills incipient human life in the womb. Moreover, no Planned Parenthood performs mammograms, and very, very few offer prenatal care. And yet Planned Parenthood is an essential provider of women’s healthcare?

Curiouser and curiouser.

In 2013, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood (PP), was paid $590,928. In regard to her 2013 income, U.S. News and World Report said “Richards makes about $100,000 more than the typical CEO for a nonprofit similar to the size of Planned Parenthood.” Here’s the kicker, in 2014 Richards was paid $957,952. PP vice president Dawn Laguens pocketed $599, 721 of blood money.

It’s time for the federal government to cease funding Planned Parenthood until such time as they  stop killing humans in the womb; stop providing contraception and abortifacients; and stop peddling a Leftist sexuality ideology to minors.

If Planned Parenthood wants to provide those products and services to minors and women of childbearing age, they should ask George Soros, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, and Ashley Judd to subsidize them.

Taxpayers should not be forced to do so.

De-Pornifying Culture

Looking at culture, it’s tempting to give up in despair. As the dad of little girls, for example, when I see the relentless objectification of women by celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, I’m tempted to think that any attempt in what William Wilberforce called a “reformation of manners” is futile. It seems that instead, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we have to “define deviance down.”

But lately, there have been encouraging signs. It’s too soon to call it a “reformation of manners” but a backlash to what one recent author called our cultural vulgarity is already asserting itself—not via the boycotts of angry culture warriors but by some of the unlikeliest cultural allies in politics, the media, and the music industry. For example, several celebrities have spoken out who’ve been repulsed by the shameless pornification of “entertainers” such as Miley Cyrus.

Singer Sinead O’Connor warned her in a direct letter, “Nothing but harm will come in the long run from allowing yourself to be exploited…. It is absolutely NOT … an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued … more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent.”

And Joan Rivers said, “We get it: You’re no longer Hannah Montana … but could you do it with a little more grace?”

Media critics are also experiencing something of a moral gag reflex. Critic Lee Siegel of The Wall Street Journal, no prude himself, wonders how we became so coarse, in the process draining the mystery and pleasure right out of sex.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf says that pornography is actually killing our desire for sex. Indeed, one study shows that couples may be having 20 percent less sex than they did ten years ago. With all the celebration of sex, I wonder why?

Jonah Goldberg writes, “Today, there’s nothing suggestive about Miley Cyrus. Nobody watching her twerk thinks, ‘I wonder what she’s getting at?’”

And writing for Glamour, a decidedly liberal magazine, television star Rashida Jones calls for a new conversation about the exploitation of Miley Cyrus: “This isn’t showing female sexuality; this is showing what it looks like when women sell sex,” Jones says. “Also, let’s be real. Every woman’s sexuality is different. Can all of us really be into stripper moves?”

And even some politicians are aggressively trying to draw some boundaries, at least overseas. A parliamentarian in Iceland, described as “ultra-liberal” by The Economist, is attempting to outlaw online pornography, believing it contributes to prostitution. British Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to change the default setting on online porn to blocked, unless a household specifically chooses to opt in. Porn in homes is, he says, “corroding childhood.” They’re seeing the consequences of bad ideas about sex in the real world.

Now, many of these new allies have little on which to base their revulsion of the new vulgarity other than their feelings. They know it’s destructive and hurtful to women, children, and families, but they don’t know why. And that’s where Christians can step in with a little gentle teaching about worldview. We might even be surprised at their response.

The culture’s growing acknowledgement of the hurtfulness of porn reveals, in the words of our friend J. Budziszewski, “The task of debate about morality is not so much teaching people what they have no clue about, but bringing to the surface the latent moral knowledge or suppressed moral knowledge that they have already.”

We can explain that our opposition to the pornification of culture is not because we’re afraid of sex, but because we abhor the consequences of its misuse for those created in the image of God. We can confidently tell them that the good gift of sex in marriage brings children, and intimacy, and allows us to learn something of the love of God for his people. The pornification of culture cheapens and obscures this valuable gift.

And that can help explain where all of this gagging has been coming from.

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.com website, and the audio broadcast originally aired January 7, 2014.

While we could decry the antics of the former child star Hanna Montana on the stage of the Video Music Awards, we really have no one to blame but ourselves.  America is awash in pornography. It is an industry with a larger annual income than the entire NFL Superbowl.  We lift up women as sex objects, teach children that they descended from animals, and enforce that by teaching them to use condoms because we expect them to behave like dogs when hormones kicks in. We even tell them silly stories about “gay penguins” to justify any abnormal sexual impulse they might have otherwise questioned.  
 
Miley Cyrus is the epitome of what we routinely teach young people to be and do for fame and fortune in Hollywood and the music industry, both areas that we constantly worship and look to as a culture.  
 
Why are we shocked when she provides a disgusting display on a TV show before a cheering audience?  Anyone who dares to suggest we return to the moral standards that Americans widely embraced for our first 150 years is pummeled by the patron saints of tolerance. 
 
We applaud pushing the boundaries, then we act surprised when young girls exceed the antics of “stars” like Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga forgetting that we reap what we sow. We decry sex crimes and child abductions, never making the connection as to how we grow and feed offenders in our culture. 
 
If you would like to read a good analysis of this phenomenon and its impact, particularly on young girls, John Whitehead has a good editorial about this HERE.