Friday, November 10, 2017

Time to Take a Bigger Moral Stand

Has anyone else noticed that there have been a lot of "sex scandals" in the news lately? If you watch any news at all, there's a good chance you have. A lot of women are speaking up and accusing famous men of inappropriate behavior, and some are even being accused of molesting children. It's difficult to say how much of it is true. But in any case, women and children are supposed to be treated with respect and we should oppose all behavior that runs contrary to that.

But as I look around and observe everything happening in our society, I have one question to ask. It may seem cruel, but we need to ask ourselves:

Should we really be surprised?

I'm always amazed at how everyone acts so shocked when they hear that some celebrity acted inappropriately. Has anyone watched prime time TV lately? Crass and immoral behavior is everywhere. How about turning the radio on to the top 40 stations? I can't believe the lyrics to some of the songs on there. Many of them glorify treating women like objects (or in some cases, female singers are doing it for men, too). And listening to it is as easy as turning on a radio. No one seems to have a problem with any of that; in fact, we can't seem to get enough. Why the double standard?

I was in my early teens when the Bill Clinton sex scandal was in the news back in the late 1990s. I'm sure this was not the first time that a President ran around on his wife or acted with moral indecency while in office. But up to that point, such behavior was usually concealed from public view. This was partly because we went a long time without the technology and ubiquitous news media we have today, and partly because we at least had enough decency to protect the public - especially children - from such lewd behavior.

This was a potential turning point in our nation's history. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that the public was forced to confront the moral transgressions of President Clinton. Parents had a chance to teach their children a lesson in right and wrong, about how it's important to stay strong while living in a sinful world. With technology starting to make it easy to bring immorality into our homes, this was an opportunity for us as a nation to stand up and say that we will not allow filth to run rampant in our society.

But if this was God's way of testing us, we failed miserably. We were told that "it's just sex" - that it's none of our business and that we should focus on the more important task of helping the President do his job. Did Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs impact his ability to make military decisions or to try to fix the economy? Well, maybe it didn't. But that's missing the bigger point. We didn't have to impeach Clinton to take a stand. We could have examined ourselves and decided it was time to tone down the sex and violence on TV and the radio, or at the very least not make it so easy for children to access.

Instead, it's become much worse. Nothing is sacred. I remember being shocked when I heard the occasional bad word on TV; now it's everywhere, even on the over-the-air channels. Sure, the media shoves this down our throats, but if we stopped watching it would affect their bottom line and they'd have to take it off the air.

Today, I hear elementary and middle school kids regularly using words that I didn't even know when I was their age. Adults aren't off the hook either; I frequently hear them use language in everyday conversation - even in front of children - that would have been unacceptable just a generation ago. With our moral standards lower than ever, why do we act so stunned when we hear about inappropriate behavior on the news? I don't understand it. We can't have it both ways.

Our lax moral standards may have brought us to a new low last year, when we were forced to choose between two Presidential candidates with far from stellar moral reputations. We either had to pick Bill Clinton's wife, who tried to shame many of the women who spoke out against her husband, or a man with his own history of treating women poorly.

How could it have come to this? As a Christian, I had to make a decision with which I was not comfortable with either of the choices. But that's what we get for letting our country slide so deeply into the moral abyss. Speaking out against Bill Clinton and then voting for Donald Trump is not necessarily hypocrisy. For many of those who did this, it was a necessary evil for living in these dark times. I believe that Trump's ability to gain the nomination from a major political party is a direct result of our failure to stand up to indecency in our public officials two decades earlier.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our elected officials are a reflection of us. And so is everything else we see in the news and on our televisions and computers. It wouldn't be there if we didn't ask for it. So what are we going to do about it? Are we going to continue to become outraged for a short moment the next time a big scandal breaks then go back to all the same TV shows and movies? Are we going to complain about the lack of leadership from our elected officials do but keep putting the same types of people into office?

Or are we all going to decide that things will only improve if we change our attitudes and our actions?

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." This saying gets overused to the point of, well, insanity. But this is one instance in which it really applies. We can't act outraged over one moral indiscretion but glorify another. We need to hold our fellow citizens to high moral standards, but it may be even more important to do the same for ourselves. Evil will never completely go away, but if we find the courage to do this, maybe then we'll see fewer disturbing stories on the news.

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