Someone once said that a good slogan can stifle rational thought for 50 years. A new slogan is “Love is Love!” It is a great-sounding slogan, but is it true? I know from personal experience it is not necessarily true.
I knew a teacher who “fell in love” with a 15-year-old student. He was 47. I’ll call him N. He left his wife and four children to be with her. (Think Mary Kay Letourneau with the genders reversed.)
N spent time in jail for sexual exploitation of a minor. His teaching license was revoked, and he became a community pariah. N betrayed his wife of 22 years, his children, his profession, and the trust of the student’s parents. He was a stiff-necked and unrepentant hebephile (sexually attracted to girls in early pubescence) who stubbornly maintained “Love is Love.” (It was later discovered his hebephilia overlapped with pedophilia.)
Did the slogan hold true? He was certainly in love with the girl. There was no denying it. Is love still love when it’s used to justify deviant behaviors that defy community standards, betray those who loved the culprit most, or defy long-held societal morality? No! Not all behaviour can be justified by catchy phrases or slogans.
And that’s accentuated when it is harmful to children. Why do children always seem to pay the highest cost for adult aberrance from societal norms or cultural social experiments? This is glaringly evident with abortion acceptance (contrived “reproductive rights”), and sexual orientation and gender identification (SOGI) curriculums being thrust upon children as early as kindergarten.
Not all behaviour is acceptable just because a society’s sexual mores and preferences change or become accepted by the majority, by a well-connected vociferous minority. Pedophilia and hebephilia are never acceptable, even if most people support it! Pedophiles call themselves “minor-attracted” persons. Bah! Beware of people who hide their abhorrent behaviors behind slogans, catchphrases, or euphemisms.
I am part of the baby boom generation. I witnessed the sexual revolution that took root during the 1960s-1970s. There were popular slogans to promote sexual promiscuity and drug use. Slogans like, “If it feels good, do it” were used to justify promiscuous sex outside of marriage. The slogan “don’t knock ‘til you’ve tried it” was used to justify illicit drug use, among other things. “Free love” was used for casual sex. It wasn’t free. The cost came in the form of broken homes and divorce, rampant sexually transmitted infections, abortion, and countless broken hearts. The slogan of free love promoted lust, not love. The sexual revolution was based on a false promise of freedom, behavior without consequences, and irresponsibility to the community in favour of personal autonomy. Instead, what we got was more than the ‘boomers of yore anticipated. As of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated:
- STIs like herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis can increase the risk of HIV acquisition.
- Mother-to-child transmission of STIs can result in stillbirth, neonatal death, low birth weight and prematurity, sepsis, neonatal conjunctivitis, and congenital deformities.
- HPV infection causes cervical and other cancers.
- Hepatitis B resulted in an estimated 820,000 deaths in 2019, mostly from cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. STIs such as gonorrhea and chlamydia are major causes of pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility in women.[1]
That is not free love. It has been a catastrophic 60-year social experiment that has deviated within deviancy, where a hook-up culture is normalized, or the myth that men can become women and women become men has been embraced by the cultural élites, educators, and media. Free love was a failure.
True freedom comes with responsibility. It never includes the freedom to kill another (abortion and assisted suicide). True freedom does not search for ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ or relative truth. It searches for THE Truth. Freedom does not just include what I want to do, but also what I ought to do. The word “ought” indicates there is such a thing as right and wrong, truth and falsehood. What I want to do is less important than doing what I ought to do.
Am I saying there is such a thing as objective truth? Yes. My behaviour should draw me closer to that truth. My smallest of actions or behaviours either draw me closer to it or take me further from it. The sexual revolution (and its sad legacy) has taken us further from the Truth. That Truth is found in following Jesus Christ,[2] and His word. The dismantling of our former Judeo-Christian cultural ethic and ethos was intentional. I think our culture is collapsing because we have thrown off restraint and the idea of an ultimate source of what defines Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. In other words, God. America and Canada must turn back Him.
That is the only way out of the cultural and human collapse we are witnessing.
[1] World Health Organization, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI), 10 July 2023. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)
[2] John 14.6.
