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September 3, 2007
The 60s sexual
revolution was in full bloom as I headed to college in 1969. Founded
on a new definition of happiness…the pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow…the revolution spawned a new vocabulary.
Words birthed in
the sexual revolution…liberation, freedom, self-expression,
empowerment…all of these defined the supposed rewards of releasing
strictures and limits of a more “primitive world” imposed on human
behavior. We demanded a better happiness. Anything goes. If it
feels good, do it. No limits. No fear.
A new kind of
happiness at the end of the rainbow thus demanded a new road to
happiness. Planning families gave way to preventing families. Babies
were prevented by pills instead of self-control, and when both
self-control and pills failed, babies were redefined as tissues and
cells to be removed or eliminated.
Social
institutions and cultural pace-setters became vested in affirming this
new road to happiness. Professors wrote new textbooks based on an
untested social hypothesis, and they began indoctrinating a generation
to believe that science would eventually document the success of
reengineering creation.
Capitalizing on
the profits to be made in promoting the proposition that unrestrained
human behavior leads to self-fulfillment, marketing campaigns put the
mantra to snappy jingles, do it my way for the me
generation.
Man as the
creator…recreating ourselves in the image of the happiness we thought
we most wanted. We have finally succeeded in elevating our selfish
interests to the pinnacle of noble achievement.
Now all that
remains to complete this brave new world is removing the
vestiges of antiquated notions of family from our laws and social
government. California is prepared to lead the way. In legal briefs
filed with the California Supreme Court by the California Governor and
Attorney General, marriage between a man and a woman has been reduced
to an inconsequential notion without any social merit to motivate
governmental support.
This is an odd
time to dismantle marriage as mankind has known it…just at the time
when social research has given expression to the powerfully positive
effects of raising children in a stable marriage between mother and
father. Even as we have insisted for forty years on our rights to
construct a new happiness, research leads back to the world we are
running from.
Social research
clearly shows the benefits of traditional family structure on building
self-esteem for children, leading to their success in school and
reducing the negatives for them of crime, drugs, alcohol and risky
behaviors. Children in modern research studies are giving powerful
witness to the pain and harm of divorce. Listening to them…what is
the impact on our children of recreating the world for ourselves? We
have “won” at their expense.
The breakup of
families is no easy path to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Neither is the destruction of life required by campaigns to prevent
families. Courageous voices of women who bought into the sexual
revolution are being heard, a testimony to the failure of pills and
medical procedures to produce the promised happiness.
Families,
marriage and children…these were not accidents of an antiquated
creation we could dispose of without consequence. They were the
products of truth, the truth of human existence created long before we
were the twinkle in our parents’ eyes.
Truth exists for
us to know. We must learn truth, not create it. Truth doesn’t come
and go, changing hither and thither, based on our own whims. Truth
was created in the beginning…without our input. It forms the
foundation for our human nature and happiness.
Lust and
covetousness were more than sins. They defined boundaries set on
human willfulness and rebellion, limiting our selfishness in wanting
more of the world than we were entitled to.
If truth be
known, happiness was always there for us to have. We just ignored the
road signs and charted our own path away from the end of the rainbow.
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