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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2008 Gary Hardaway
680 words

REVERSING SEXUAL SUICIDE:  A SIMPLE PROPOSAL

By: Gary Hardaway

Why do they do it? Young actors, like Heath Ledger, overdose on dozens of pills.  Young kids accidentally hang themselves trying to get an oxygen-deprivation high.  Speed demons crash into a tree at a hundred miles an hour. Such senseless, tragic self-destruction.

Another kind of tragic tale unfolds in a recent syndicated advice column. “Jennifer” and her boyfriend “have been together” for over three years. They now have an eight month old baby. Jennifer desperately longs to get married. She’s asked him “a thousand times,” but he has shot her down every time. Though she’s beginning to doubt his love, she continues to overlook and forgive because “I realize he’s young and just wants to live his life right now.”

It’s enough to make a grown man cry. If Jennifer were my daughter, I would weep buckets over her appalling blindness and folly. I would weep even more for the pitiful, innocent child destined to grow up essentially fatherless, being raised by a hapless mother. I would shed many tears of remorse for my own failure to prepare my daughter for responsible adulthood.

I would have to stifle a bunch of angry, but useless questions.  “What in the world were you thinking? You chose an immature, selfish, inconsiderate male and made a baby with him, knowing all the while he ‘wants to live his life right now.’ Do you realize how insane that is? There is no excuse for this boyfriend of yours. How can you keep on excusing the inexcusable? What’s wrong with you?” Before the event, some of these questions are valid.  After the damage is done, they lose whatever redeeming value they might have possessed.

As early as 1973, George Gilder renamed the so-called “Sexual Revolution” “Sexual Suicide.” The movement unleashed males to engage in perpetual, adolescent promiscuity or, in this case, live-in bed-sharing without a smidgen of commitment. The victims of this male triumph are females.

The woman is expected to provide constant free sex without emotionally, spiritually bonding with the “boyfriend.” If . . . when . . .  she gets pregnant that’s her problem. Often the dude tells her to get an abortion. If she chooses to bear the child, that’s her kid and her responsibility. Why? Well, ‘He’s young and just wants to live his life right now.” The “boyfriend” gets to remain a boy. The unwed mother gets to go it alone.

Once upon a time parents and community leaders upheld the disciplines of chastity, courtship and marriage. They knew that sex before marriage is never “safe” in the spiritual sense because it exploits instead of unifies, damages instead of enriches a relationship. In 1960, about 5% of American children were born out of wedlock. That has now soared to 40%. Sexual suicide runs rampant as one generation fails to transmit the ethos of courtship and marriage to its children and grandchildren. 

Courtship requires a man to honor a woman by proving his worth as a potential husband. If he shows himself diligent, responsible, and industrious, he may propose marriage. He will not make sexual propositions.

If he should presume to ask for sex, the woman has an excellent opportunity to correct his manners and emphasize that she will settle for nothing less than totally committed life partnership – marriage, nothing else. If he “wants to live his life right now,” good riddance.  A few tears of disappointment may fall, but tragedy has been averted. 

This simple, healthy, beautiful pattern of morality and wisdom finds its best expression in the Bible. At the beginning of the human race we read that “A man will cleave to his WIFE, and they will become one.” Notice the order: marriage, then sexual and emotional oneness. One biblical author tells us “The marriage bed is undefiled.” That clearly implies that the bed of an unmarried couple IS defiled. Something’s intrinsically wrong with it.

If you don’t believe it, ask Jennifer. She gets the final word. “Here I sit with an eight-month-old daughter, and no wedding ring, no proposal, no plans, no nothing.”

Gary Hardaway is executive director of Summit School of Ministry in Northwest Washington. He holds a Ph. D in foundations of education and is a member of the National Association of Scholars.  He has taught in universities in the USA, Lithuania and Canada. He holds a Ph. D. in foundations of education. "Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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