A Day in the Life of Ivan at the Discount Store

My wife and thirteen year old daughter were talking about how hard it was to find clothes that were not sexually suggestive for young girls. I told my daughter to show me what she was talking about and we went to the super discount store.

Like most guys, I avoid the women's clothing section, so I felt a little awkward, but I soon saw they had understated the problem. Panties with "Who needs credit cards?" on the front. The Jim Benton collection with these phrases: "Let's focus on me". "Cruel but cute so I'm worth it". "Hating you makes me warm inside". "Hate is a special kind of love we give to people who suck."

Are these really the messages we want young girls wearing on their underwear? My blood began to boil as I visualized the marketing steps this garbage went through, and how many people who should have vetoed this clothing line chickened out to protect their paycheck. I had no idea you could buy see-through thong panties at the discount stores, but you can.

Why?

We went to the greeting card section where my daughter handed me a birthday card. It had this shining example of creativity on the front: "Jack wasn't nimble, Jack wasn't quick, He sat on your cake, and burned his. . ."

At the toy aisle we checked out the posters. Maxim Girls and The Girls of Hawaiian Tropic with perpetual come hither looks next to Tinkerbell, and cartoon Cars. One poster said, "So many boys, so little time". Another poster was an Andy Warhol version of Playboy logos.

Why?

We went to the movie section. Many had bold red labels boasting "Uncensored". In the kids section I picked up a Black DVD titled Metalocaypse with this label: Warning. Uncensored. Special Features contain mature themes and vulgar and sexually explicit language not for viewing by children under 17. Viewer and Parental discretion are strongly advised.

Why?

We went to the books and noticed an entire section devoted to Harlequin /Silhouette Desire paperbacks. I picked up "What She Really Wants for Christmas" and opened it in the middle. I cannot write here what I read, but it was pure, hard core porn. I looked at the floor to eye level display of Christmas themed books with titles like, "Christmas in His Royal Bed", "An Affair before Christmas" and so on. No indication they were X-rated adult books. I called a female associate over and handed her the book. She read one line and slammed it shut.

"I'll get a manager."

The manager came and I handed him the book. He glanced at the text and turned red. "See any warning label?" I asked.

"No."

"Is that appropriate for just anyone to pick up?"

"No."

In 1978 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winning author and Russian dissident who courageously exposed the atrocities of the Soviet Gulag system, was addressing a graduating class at Harvard University. He shared these observations about the problems he saw with Western culture: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Solzhenitsyn understood the corrosive nature of evil. He had seen first hand a society that cast off God, only to reap a whirlwind of injustice, pain and suffering. That day at Harvard he pleaded for the West to repent, only to be dismissed as a fanatic by New York Times and get uninvited to the White House by the Carter Administration.

Solzhenitsyn's books should be required reading, but they require (and teach) a basic understanding of world history, philosophy, and theology. In other words, they require too much thinking for textbook to test teachers and attention deficit students. It's too bad, because understanding the truth of history would cure our indifference to creeping socialism.

The ACLU and other godless organizations send letters (and in some cases lawyers) to every school board in the nation to make sure children are "protected" from any exposure to unconstitutional religious ideas, yet no one sees the need to protect children from the hypersexed swill marketed directly at them in every discount store in the country.

Why?

Across The Line While Waiting In Line

In my last column I lamented the increasingly sexualized products now available in almost every store, especially those targeted at younger children. I received a lot of e-mail, and most of it asked me to address the problem of sexually explicit images on television which are increasingly impossible to avoid.

Before considering television, I have to go back to the discount stores and grocery chains. Isn't it odd that businesses which have no problem selling books with titles like, "What She really Wants For Christmas" or "Christmas In His Royal Bed" have cut most, if not all references to Christmas from their advertising, display and promotional materials?

Who is making these decisions?

The reason we and our children get an eyeful of silicone implants and garbage headlines from the tabloids every time we go through the check out stand is because no one objected. Now pornographic paperbacks without any age restrictions or warning labels are on the book racks, the girls clothing departments look like sex shops, and the raunchy videos. . . hey, no one's objecting. If a strip bar opened across the street from your house, I doubt you would just avoid looking and let it go, but for most people the embarrassment of taking a stand against evil. . .

Evil? Did I just equate tabloid and magazine covers at the check out aisles with evil?

Evil is the Nazi extermination of men, women and children. Evil is Stalin murdering millions of "cogs" and falsely imprisoning millions more. Evil is people who open fire at schools or the mall.

Sexy pictures are not evil. Those who think they are, well, there's evil for you. After all, didn't Hitler and Stalin want to run everyone's life and tell them what to do?

My interest in studying Hitler and Stalin, both God hating sexual perverts determined to destroy families, is that they came to power in post-Christian countries. I'm convinced our culture is traveling a similar path, and one obvious indication is our plummeting standards for decency. Sexual immorality and unbelief fuel each other, and they have always led to disaster in individuals, families and cultures.

According to scripture, sex was meant to be highly valued, but subservient to family. Today sex is overvalued, one might say hypervalued, while families are disintegrating. If sex were limited to faithful married couples, STDs would disappear without drugs. There are now over two dozen STDs and many of them have no known cure. HIV/AIDS has killed more than all our wars combined. One in four girls are sexually molested before reaching adulthood, and the percentage of molested boys is growing. I could bury you in statistics which should be shocking, but nothing shocks us anymore. Do people have the right to think about sex in any form? Is viewing or reading about people engaged in sex evil?

Every single one of us has a line which we think crossing is evil. Almost all would say sexual fantasies which involve abusing children or killing people are evil—way over the line. So there is a line. What basis do we have for drawing that line and where should that line be?

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Allright bro! Consensual sex! I'm totally there!

Did I hear you say it would be okay if your sister or daughter was a stripper or prostitute? Would it be all right if she joined the drug addicts in the porn industry? How about if she was used and dumped by some guy who just wanted to hook up? Would it be okay for a man to introduce your son to sex? Are you okay with a woman seducing your daughter? Would you want your child's struggles with drugs or infidelity splattered on the cover of the tabloids?

Only the blind can't see that today's hypersexed culture is doing irreparable damage to our families, especially the children.

I can't control the way life turns, but I would have my daughters and sons (and yours) chaste, innocent and able to present themselves to their spouse for a lifetime of sexual intimacy that remains in its proper place.

We must consider every person as someone's son or daughter—because they are. To cross the line, to seduce, deceive and use people for profit or pleasure is to be on the side of evil. Those responsible for the garbage children are now exposed to have crossed it, and they are dragging along all of us who do nothing to stop them.