But I Regress

I don't know if the old "frog in the water" analogy actually works, but you know how it goes. Put a frog in a pot of water, slowly turn up the heat, and if the change is slow enough, the frog won't know he's being cooked until it's too late. Real? I doubt it. But you get the idea.

Our lives today are full of living examples of that warning. In the '50's, only "bad" people had sex outside marriage and pornography was located in hidden, out of the way places. By the '60's, the younger generation's "free love" movement had shifted that away to, as Marvin Gaye said, "Giving yourself to me can never be wrong if the love is true" and pornography was found in more mainstream magazines like Playboy who had the remotest of possibilities of being read for the articles. Today? The current younger generation believes in "friends with benefits" and are horrified at the suggestion of "wait until you're married". "That's crazy!" (I put that in quotes because it was a quote from someone I know who heard that a young man had saved himself for marriage.) Pornography is freely and readily available to children on the Internet. And now we no longer know what sex is for, no longer know what love really means, are quite sure that delayed gratification is evil (if we can actually define the term), and believe that anyone should indulge in anything they so desire. Well, not child porn or child molesting or ... okay, one or two things, maybe. That the fringe has moved from "bad people have sex outside marriage" to "bad people are involved in child molesting" is no big deal. We frogs don't feel the heat.

The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals has offered another example. In their ruling on Prop 8, they've determined that "All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships." Interesting. The issue here is "the right to be granted marriage licenses". It wasn't the issue back in May, 2008, when the California Supreme Court struck down the California law that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. Back then it was about definition. And (get this) it wasn't unclear. The Court understood that "the longstanding and traditional definition of marriage" is the union of one man and one woman. They didn't question that. They decided, consciously, that it should be changed. So notice the way it changes. It moves from the definition of marriage to the re-definition of marriage to "marriage licenses" and "marriage equity". And now we're dancing out here on the fringes of an argument where you can't actually get at the real issue (the definition of marriage) because we're talking about "unequal treatment". According to the court, defining marriage in the longstanding and traditional way "serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples." And how many of the frogs feel the heat now?

But look how far we (Christians) have come on this. The biblical prescription for marriage was the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation and companionship. My making that statement will undoubtedly raise objections ... from Christians. Prior to 1960 (remember, the "sexual revolution"), the vast majority of Christians, Catholic and Protestant, believed that contraception was against God's will. To even make such a suggestion today is met with strong Christian opposition. And what has contraception bought us? It was the "gateway drug" so to speak for "free love", for removal of the limits of sex within marriage, and for even viewing procreation as an issue. Contraception is the reason today that almost all of the "more civilized" nations of the world have reached the effective reproduction rate of nearly negative, the point at which the number of children per family is less than what is required to sustain the population. So in a mere couple of decades Christians have moved from "Contraception is not God's will" to "How could you even suggest such a thing?". This has been a key step in the process of redefining marriage, and we are complicit. How about us frogs? Feeling it? No, I don't think so.

Look around you. I suspect you will have a hard time seeing it. The effects of the "youth culture" of the '60's that has made the biblical concept of wisdom with the elders seem foolish. The radicalism of the Feminist Movement of the '70's that has stripped the biblical concept of male and female roles pointless. The "sexual revolution" that has stripped sex of any meaning but recreation and eliminated any biblical morality on the subject. The evolution of the term, "Evangelicalism", which was once a means of identifying those who held to Scripture but now has little meaning. Even the notion of the purpose of the church, which was biblically to build up believers, then moved to "sharing the gospel", and is now closer to the "social gospel". It's called devolution. And we are regressing -- moving away from morality and toward the more base human depravity. Another "frog in the pot" moment? We're calling that "progress".

Side Note: Based on my comments about contraception, I have been asked, "Do you think contraception is against God's will? Do you think contraception should be outlawed?" I've answered the first question before quite awhile ago and I have a few times since. The second, I suppose, is a little baffling. I think it is God's will that everyone repent and turn to Him. Do I think that should be the law? I don't think that everything I think is God's will should also be the law.