Recently I went to the mall -- for the first time in a while. I was absolutely appalled at the pornography plastered on the windows of Victoria's Secret. Every 11-year-old boy in our society is learning to treat women as objects. Every 11-year-old girl is learning that if she wants to be valued, she has to take off her clothes. Advertisements constantly reduce women to objects of gratification. The message to their audience is simple: this is what a woman is for.
With such a message so shamelessly proclaimed, are we surprised that sex has become completely divorced from the life-long commitment it requires (marriage) and openness to life? We are told that sex has nothing to do with marriage or bringing new life into this world -- unless you want it to. By removing these intrinsic meanings from sex, we reduce it to mere physical recreation. If it's only physical, why treat that person with dignity? If sex doesn't require a life-long commitment, or openness to life, it is just fertile ground for use and abuse. Are we surprised that divorce, rape, abortion, and contraception parallel the extensive pornography across our country and globe?
These selfish substitutions for true love reduce something beautiful to something cheap. Love becomes lust. Lust tells us that a person is to be used like a machine and can thus be disposed of afterward. And what if a new human is created by this sexual union? Well that one must be disposed of too. Abortion follows unbridled lust -- the lust that companies like Victoria's Secret tell us is normal, the lustful gratification they insist we deserve, the lust at the eye-level of a 6-year-old at every grocery store.
In this way, men are told women are sex objects. And this is one man that is very angry about it. Women are reduced to animals and men are reduced with them. We are told, as one "expert" said on the Today Show, "Men are hard wired to have lots of sex with multiple partners." Self-control! What's that? Fortitude? Temperance? "Do whatever feels good" is society's mantra: starting with lust and leading to abortion, leaving women, men, and children broken in its wake.
Is there an alternative to this lust-laden way of life where self-satisfaction only leads to destruction and misery? Yes!
A chaste woman who values modesty -- now there's something attractive. Anyone can take her clothes off, and reduce herself to an object. But a woman who respects her body, that's hot. A courageous man with fortitude who doesn't want to be sold sex -- there's the moral fiber that will bring an end to abortion.
That man and that woman are the kind who will seek to do the right thing, even when its difficult. Abortion and its precursor, lust, are about convenience. Child-rearing and its precursor, virtue, are about sacrifice. And that's true love.
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