Opinion
A world of hurt

By Dale O'Leary
Posted: 8/2/2013

The Sexual Revolutionaries began their assault on sexual morality decades ago. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Heffner, Doctor Ruth, and a host of others argued that sexual pleasure was a positive good and there was no reason to restrict it to marriage between one man and one woman for life or connect it to the procreation of children. They pushed for absolute sexual freedom, the right to enjoy sex alone or with others of either sex, or any number, with or without an emotional connection, without guilt, shame, or social condemnation. They argued for the normalization of prostitution, pornography and fetishism. Everything was okay as long as no one got hurt, and the parties consented. Of course, they then argued that the age of consent be lowered.

The unalloyed benefits of absolute sexual freedom was predicated on the promise that the participants have access to the technology to avoid negative outcomes such as out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. If people are going to have absolute sexual freedom, they need easy access to condoms, contraception, and abortion. And if children are going to be comfortable with their absolute sexual freedom, they need comprehensive sex education to teach them about their right to have sexual pleasure and where to obtain contraceptive, condoms, and abortion without parental knowledge or consent. Since religion has traditionally condemned sex outside marriage, traditional religion must be driven from the marketplace of ideas or converted to the ideology of the Sexual Revolution.

The problem with this is that someone always gets hurt. The situation reminds me of the dilemma of Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Shylock claimed a right to a pound of flesh from his enemy, but he had to take the pound of flesh without shedding a drop of blood. He couldn't do it. The Sexual Revolutionaries pretend they are promoting pleasure without pain, but the blood of their victims is all over them. They cannot promote the pleasure without causing pain: the millions killed by abortion, the dead and damaged from AIDs and other sexually transmitted diseases, the emotional devastation of serial monogamy and divorce, the epidemic of unwed births, fatherless families, women grieving for the children they can never have because an STD has rendered them sterile. The horrors of the Gosnell abortion clinic are the direct result of the Sexual Revolution.

When solitary sexual pleasure is promoted, sexual addiction becomes a serious problem. Pornography combined with self-abuse sets up patterns in the brain that can be as addictive as cocaine. The news is full of stories about politicians who threw away promising careers because they were addicted to perverse sexual behavior. Pedophiles, rapists, users of child pornography all probably started out believing in their right to sexual pleasure. Once addicted, they dispensed with the need to obtain the consent of their victims. This ends with a sex addict in Ohio who kidnapped three girls to service his needs.

In an impassioned monologue Bill O'Reilly of Fox News blamed the problems faced by the black community on the breakdown of the family, evidenced by the fact that 71 percent of black births are to unmarried women. However, out-of-wedlock births are not just a problem in the black community; this is a national tragedy. In all the discussion about O'Reilly's comments -- and there has been a lot -- no one has mentioned the Sexual Revolution. Out-of-wedlock births happen because of out-of-wedlock sex. If women don't have sex outside of marriage, they won't have babies outside marriage.

God didn't say sexual relations outside marriage are wrong because he wanted to deprive people of pleasure, but because he designed sexuality for marriage and any other use of it -- no matter how pleasant the initial sensation -- leads to a world of hurt. Unfortunately the world has bought into the Sexual Revolutionaries' lie that people can have the pleasure without the pain; we must make the connection for them. Every negative outcome of the Sexual Revolution must be traced back to its source. The horrors we see around us, that we hear about everyday on the news, didn't just happen. They were produced by Sexual Revolutionaries who like all revolutionaries ignored the inevitable consequences of their ideology.

Dale O'Leary is a freelance writer and author of "The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality" and "One Man, One Woman."