Blog Archives
Adolescent Sex Is as Addictive as Crack Cocaine
Adolescent sex is as addictive as meth, crack cocaine, alcohol, or nicotine. Once teens start having sex it’s like two right handed children playing left handed catch with a live hand grenade. I was a “wait ‘til you marry” person, not because I was a “goodie two shoes,” but because I was a devout coward. In my day there were immediate unpleasant consequences for getting pregnant outside marriage And we weren’t surrounded by people selling sex as the only reason for living. But today’s world is simply saturated with sex in almost every ad, book, movie, and on line site. The culture no longer supports abstinence or even monogamy. No matter how good, articulate, loving, and supportive we are as parents……it is like sending our children into war with water guns. Kids have way too much freedom at very young ages, both the opportunities and stress of unchaperoned situations, and less immediate consequences than older generations had. And like all adolescents they live in the moment, oblivious to any life long consequences. Or they are like most of us are about death, not believing pregnancy or disease will happen to them.
Short of locking them up from 12 to 21, I have no simple solutions. I believe and talk about a loving forgiving God, but what I probably never stress enough is that neither love nor forgiveness protects us from the consequences of our bad choices. Without obvious consequences we will just keep making them. That’s not what a loving God wants or allows for us.
In our teens most of us aren’t yet sure who we are or if who we are will turn out to be sufficient in this world. Sex isn’t just amazing pleasure, it makes us feel like a hero or princess…..we are #1 with someone. We are not alone anymore as we do the work of separating who we are from who our parents are.
We don’t realize that need is not love and that infatuation doesn’t last. Learning to love takes years of learning to make unselfish choices. When we make our lives incredibly harder by creating another life that we aren’t yet equipped to nurture, finance, and protect by putting their many needs before our wants, our infatuation seldom has a chance to become love. The overload of challenges may well freeze us in our immaturity and lock us into remaining overwhelmed immature children making bad choices for much of our lives. So many lives are stunted from choices made in the teen years.
And for most youth the danger of disease has no more personal reality than death. No matter what medicines are available, the consequences of STD’s and even the side effects of medicines for them can permanently diminish the joy of sex and complicate relationships. Today even many adults assume there’s a medicine for everything. But the reality is that as soon as we find a cure for one disease, another disease appears. The sad reality is that often the victims are youth who plan to abstain from sex until old enough to make a life commitment, but are overwhelmed by cultural circumstances.
Many people of all ages assume a fetus is not a person and if we are the type of person who doesn’t naturally consider possibilities, we may not worry much about emotional repercussions from having an abortion. But in my 78 years of life, I have witnessed the changes in personality traits that people experience as they enter different stages of life. I am convinced that even those that do not feel guilt, worry, sadness or even curiosity about their unborn child at the time of making the choice for abortion, will eventually have to deal with those.
I think society has pretty much obliterated fear of hell. What no one warns is that bad choices can turn our life here into a hell,.
Parents, tell it like it is. They may not hear you, but at least you will have tried.
Write a comment…
Abortion: Do We Choose Law or Love?
Expecting others, who are very different from ourselves and our families and who may live in much harsher environments without the emotional and physical support we have, to make the same hard choices we might make is not even just, never-the-less loving.
This week I voted against Amendment 1 which was to allow Tennessee to write its own stricter laws on abortion.
The following paragraph is from my daughter-in-law who chose to give birth to a wonderful child that she and our son and all our family have loved and nurtured and delighted in for over a decade, even though an ultra sound early in her pregnancy showed that the baby had a serious disability. These are not the words of a woman who chose abortion when she could have.
“Imagine you have a 13 year old daughter. Now imagine that she has been raped or molested and that act of violence resulted in pregnancy. Now imagine sitting in a clinic with her while she is made to watch videos on embryonic growth that are filled with anti-abortion propaganda. All of it intended to make her feel guilt over her decision and change her mind. Just think of how she is being violated all over again because at 13 she cannot bear to carry a child, because at 13 her life would be doomed due to no fault of her own. Imagine it. That’s what Tennesseans voted for last night: victimizing victims.”
Having been in high school and college during the nineteen-fifties, I’ve lived through one cultural extreme to the other: the first being absolutely no abortion, social/religious rejection of unmarried pregnant women, and strongly recommended institutionalization of children born with defects.
To be honest, fear of pregnancy and all that would come with it were the deterrents for me not having sexual relations before marriage, not morality. I simply wasn’t pure or mature enough to be spiritually motivated. I also lived a very protected life and wasn’t aware of women being raped. Being a devout coward, the cultural taboos were a protection for me.
But in the intervening years, I have learned that a surprising number of my many women friends gave up babies in those times. Now, some are reuniting with their “lost” children. I have also had the shock of knowing Christian women who have been raped through absolutely no fault of their own. And I have been the confidant of way too many Christian middle-class women who were molested or violently raped as children by authority figures, some of them close family and supposedly Christian. And I assume this wouldn’t even approximate the number of young girls raped among the economically underprivileged.
However, I find the reality, that society now considers sex just a physical experience on the same moral level as bowel movements and that abortion is used as another form of birth control, totally unacceptable.
This is not as simple an issue as both sides want to make it.
The slippery slope of when an embryo becomes a human being has no clear cut answer. The question of whether defective human beings are of such value that others must sacrifice the quality of their lives to nurture and protect them is also a serious and difficult issue, including the question of who is capable of taking that challenge on. The problem is that those having to make these choices are not all the same. They were not all protected, they are not all intelligent, they are not even all adults, or emotionally stable, they may or may not have been taught the spiritual value of sacrifice, never-the-less the finer points of theology, and their financial situations vary drastically.
This is not an even playing field.
If we want to see the issue as black and white and applicable to all Americans, regardless of whether they believe in a particular religious moral code that calls abortion murder, we are going to have to be consistent about killing as a moral option. Is killing ever moral? When? Why?
Is it moral to send our children by the thousands to kill and be killed fighting in places we have no legal and a very doubtful moral right to invade? Our current response to fear of others in the world is simply to bomb them, killing the innocent along with those we judge as guilty. Is a Syrian child of less value than an American embryo? In a democracy the government represents the people. You and I are as responsible as our leaders and those that aim the bombs.
Can we risk killing those found guilty of killing others within our own society, knowing the statistics on the innocent people that have been sent to their death by our system of justice? Is the jury morally responsible in those cases?
Is it moral to kill in self-defense? Can we morally kill in defense of our property? Are jewels and computers and televisions worth killing a human being who is possibly capable of repentance?
Can we allow people to take their own lives? Can we allow dying people to choose how they die?
Regardless of how we believe we personally would choose, we need to look deep within ourselves, imagining those vulnerable ones we love being the child or person facing these decisions. It’s not just an impersonal theological issue. Do we have the right to make these kinds of decisions for people we know nothing about and that we take no responsibility for the consequences we are insisting on forcing on them?
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 