When it comes to sex, America is considered prudish compared to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world sees itself as liberated, without the moral boundaries that some in the States still cling to.

From England, we read this shocking piece of news:

More than 450 teenagers below the age of 14 terminated pregnancies between 2005 and 2008, including 23 girls aged 12, the statistics from the Department of Health disclosed. Over the same period, 52 teenagers terminated four or more pregnancies before they reached their 18th birthday, as the total number of “repeat terminations” hit record levels across England and Wales.  [Telegraph – Scandal of the girls as young as 12 having abortions every year]

I would argue that a society’s attitude toward teen sex has a direct correlation to teen pregnancy.  Now, most people will say they are against teen pregnancy—hence why this article is titled “scandal”.  We all agree that we do not want teen pregnancies, both for the health of the mother as well as the child.

The problem is that we’re inconsistent in that the society glorifies and encourages a sex saturated environment in which experimentation and random coupling are seen as great things.  Our movies and television shows glorify this culture, and rarely show couples dealing with sexually transmitted diseases.

Society knows that sex leads to babies, but they also want the pleasure that’s involved with intimacy.  So they seek to justify their inability to practice self control with a panacea—they require sex education.  This is so that, instead of educating that sex outside of a monogamous relationship (read “marriage”) is wrong, they can feel good giving their children enough to make them dangerous.

It’s like giving a child a loaded gun, and saying, “Hey, here’s how you pull the trigger, and here’s the safety.  Now, this gun won’t do anything without the safety off, so don’t turn it off.  But feel free to go play with this gun with your friends.”  No parent would do this with their kids, but we’ll give them some birth control and let them go out and sleep around knowing that they’re “this close” to contracting an illness they’ll either have for the rest of their life or kill them.

Is that knowledge really that beneficial without the moral guidepost, or does it do more harm than good?

We have come a long way in America.  Especially when it comes to equality, and yet I’m not sure if all of the advances that we have made have been positive.

For one thing, the family as a unit is in shambles.  Marriage has been devalued to the point that people are asking “why get married” and believing that there’s no value to the vows, a public commitment or to even living a life until death.

To judge just how far we’ve come, take a look at this picture:

Now, what’s your first reaction?  If it’s wondering just what “store-testing” for fresher coffee is, you’re missing the point.

To some, this picture represents the height of male dominance.  The man is treating the woman as one of his children– spanking her for doing wrong.  Definitely not something that I believe the husband should be doing, and yet in our culture it is the woman who now treats her husband like the child.  She nags, she belittles and she talks to him as if he knows nothing.

You see, rarely does something ever change, it just moves and takes on a different form.  You won’t find a woman thinking it’s wrong for a wife to tell her husband that he forgot to the do the dishes again, or something along that line of thought, and yet it’s the same as the man in this picture.

And this is part of the modern culture and society that has now chosen to give women the right to be whatever she wants– as long as she looks sexy doing it.  I truly sympathize with women.  They are required to be too many things at once, and here is where my heart longs for the simplicity of yesterday.

It’s not that I want to spank my wife, or to lock her at home to bear children and bake cookies.  What I do mean is that there was freedom in the traditional roles of the sexes because you knew who you were, what you were supposed to do, and who you were responsible to.  Today we’re responsible to no one, not even our spouse, we spend our whole lives trying to find something to do, and we long to know who we are to the point that we redefine ourselves to look and sound like those we are not.

We have come a long way indeed.