Many years ago, when my daughter was five or six, we were standing in line at the checkout in the base exchange at Soesterberg Air Base in the Netherlands. The music playing over the store's loudspeaker system was Madonna's "Justify My Love." My daughter, a very bright child, turned to me and, referring to the sounds of the "song," asked "Mom, why is that lady making those sounds?" A very apt question. My daughter wanted to know what was the meaning of sounds that were clearly intended to imitate a woman in the throes of passion. Not wanting to get into a discussion of human sexuality right then and there, and certainly not in that context, I told her I didn't know, but I wished they wouldn't play that song.
At that point, a young airman standing in line behind me chimed in with "It's my right to listen to that music." I don't remember exactly what I said (this was over 20 years ago, after all), but I do remember that I wimped out. I think I didn't say anything to his comment. What I wish I had done was reply in this way: "Your right? What about my right not to have my daughter exposed to this kind of thing? If you want to listen to it, fine, but why should the rest of us be forced to listen to it?
On another occasion, when we were at RAF Lakenheath, England, I was browsing the magazine rack at the Stars and Stripes bookstore. My then four-year-old pointed to a slew of "girlie" magazines (which were in plain sight on the bottom shelf, right at his eye-level) and asked "Mommy, why is that lady dressed that way?" Once again, I don't remember what I said, since this was even further back, but I moved him away from the offending magazines and distracted his attention (thank heaven for a four-year-old's short attention span). What I wish I had done was to have asked to see the store manager and asked him if it was appropriate for those kinds of magazines to be down where a four-year-old could see them and get curious - not too mention an older child who might be in the store, and who might pick up one of those magazines. I wish I had confronted him, and asked him to move them.
In both cases, I wimped out, and I have been kicking myself ever since. You see, I had bought into the lie that other peoples' rights to do as they please, watch what they please, listen to what they please, look at what they please, were more important than my right not to have to do any of those things; more important than my right not to have my children exposed to them. And I was unprepared to deal with something that only 20 or 30 years earlier would not even have been on the radar.
Now I'm not arguing for censorship. I don't dispute that the young GI in the exchange had every right to listen to Madonna, or that other young GI's have a right to look at photos of nude women. I wish such things didn't exist, but they do, and I don't want this country turned into a police state. But one cannot argue that parents do not have a right, no, a responsibility, to raise their children away from such influences, at least until they are old enough to understand all the implications and ramifications.
In the nearly 50 years since the beginning of the "sexual revolution," much in our society has become coarsened. Forcible rapes are up from 9.4 per 100,000 population to 26.8 per 100,000, a greater than 280% increase, and all violent crime is up more than 200%. Children are taught "sex education" in schools, which has done little to teach them self-control and self-denial, while they are lagging in their knowledge and abilities in traditional subjects. Divorce is rampant. It's gotten so bad that when my eldest was 10 (around 25 years ago) he came home one day and asked me what was wrong with our family since he and his siblings had only one mom and one dad. Pornography pervades almost every corner of our society, and people who attend church regularly are considered "weird" by a sizable segment of the population.
Is this what the new morality has wrought? Are we really better off because of it?
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