Ten plagues were needed to deliver the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. We need ten miracles to deliver us from the immoral trash that is being heaped upon us every day! We are faced with a sea of troubles that are besetting the USA. We need a path to open in that sea of troubles so we may pass through in a new moral direction. Like the Israelites following the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, we must draw closer to moral righteousness and truth every day of our lives. We need to be delivered from the bondage of immorality, lies, and unconscionable greed.
As I ran down the stairs to the subway platform this past week, I saw before me an electric advertising sign. On those signs, an ad or announcement will glow brightly for about 30 seconds to one minute and then give way to another ad or announcement.
Descending the stairs, I saw again a posting which I had seen on another platform only a week before. It read “We Love Vaginas.” The words were posted above a photo of the lower half of a woman’s body wearing black panties.
The new lewdness is the new normal. At one point, there was a deep preoccupation with determining the point where true art could become or be considered obscenity. This concern was supposedly resolved by the SCUSA in the 1973 Miller decision (Miller v. California) to the effect that “applying contemporary community standards, would find the work appeals on the whole to prurient interests; describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and lacks any serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” The Miller criteria for assessing obscenity was updated and re-stated as recently as December 2021 by the U.S. Justice Department which published a statement to that effect and noted, “The Supreme Court has ruled that, “transmitting obscenity and child pornography, whether via the Internet or other means, is… illegal under federal law for both adults and juveniles.” —Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1998). But of course so much revolves around what the “community” considers “prurient.” That is an escape hatch that muddies the waters around enforcement and prosecution.
Yet, we find that pornographic materials are flooding our society. Tens of millions are ogling and masturbating before this flood of obscenity. Parents are attending school board meetings and are complaining incessantly about the presence of obscene material found in school libraries. We see those complaints here, here, here, and here. Millions of people casually tune into porn sites on their cell phones and look upon it as a pleasant diversion. There is no hue and outcry from the churches, mosques, or synagogues that obscenity is polluting the culture and weakening the psyches of the people. No longer is obscenity just a matter of asking if Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence is suitable for assignment for high school students to read or to be found in libraries. Rather all forms of perversion and titillating scenarios are described vividly in children’s books and accessible with some minimal “safe search” (sic) protections on some search engines.
Where are the protests? The Ten Commandments forbids adultery. Christianity teaches “as a man thinks in his heart so is he.” William Wilberforce, the preacher and polemicist who is most well-known for leading the fight to end slavery in the British Empire which came about in 1833, also founded the less well-known Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV) in 1802. The Society was authorized by King George III, the very same monarch whom we rejected as “immoral” in our War for Independence. History is full of ironies like this, but we shall not dwell on that issue here.
The SSV had a long list of offending vices that needed to be expunged from British society including “profanation of the Lord’s Day (Sunday), profane swearing, publication of blasphemous, licentious and obscene books, selling by false weights and measures, keeping of disorderly public houses, brothels, and gaming houses, illegal lotteries, cruelty to animals.”
In consideration of the main theme of this article, we see that Wilberforce was concerned about “licentious and obscene books.” However, it should be noted that this vice was only one of many vices that he saw as having overtaken society. Thus, we are not surprised to learn that the District Attorneys of many cities including New York do not prosecute prostitution any longer but treat it as a form of maladjustment to be treated therapeutically, not punished as a legal and moral wrong. Lotteries today have invaded millions of bodegas and grocery stores. Gambling casinos are no longer just to be found in Nevada as was the case in the 1950’s and 1960’s but exist in states throughout the nation.
Swearing is common in corporate offices and boardrooms. The F-word has become commonplace, and when this writer worked in a corporate division of industrial engineers even in the 1990’s, it was the expletive of choice. And, in our era, instead of cruelty to animals as existed in the early 19th century, we see the destruction of millions of babies, many of whom are dissected while alive in order to retrieve their body parts and sell them. Although David Daleiden, of the anti-abortion organization Center for Progress, lost his case in California and is appealing to the SCOTUS, the case did reveal that Planned Parenthood’s baby parts buyer sold the beating hearts and fully intact heads of innocent children killed in potentially illegal abortions.
As extensive as pornography has become despite the claimed “illegality” of obscenity (are we the biggest liars and hypocrites of all time?), it is distinctly part of a moral collapse so extensive that this writer would call the USA degenerate, not merely vice ridden. As a degenerate society, it is no longer sufficient, as Wilberforce did, to create a society to fight vice. A type of deliverance is needed. We are now held in bondage by the extent and intensity of our vice-ridden ways. Just as the Israelites were held in a socio-economic bondage and needed a miraculous intervention to save them, we in the USA need more than personal resolve and need more than what we Christians sometimes call “a revival” to save us from the vice that interpenetrates many areas of our culture. The USA needs deliverance. Will such a miraculous event come? What will it look like? How will it manifest?
Photo: Newsweek
Jeffrey Ludwig
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