By Judie Brown
If you are at all a fan of logic and common sense, then you already know that the current era in which we live is reticent when it comes to teaching, let alone living the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God. We mention this simply because without comprehending the value of such virtues, terrible things can happen to the human being and the human community.
The culture then becomes a breeding ground for killing the preborn, rejecting chastity, and disposing of the ill and old without giving these choices a second thought.
A recent headline confirms this, announcing that 62% of young adults would not live in a state with an abortion ban in place. The CNBC/Generation Lab survey of 1,033 people between the ages of 18 and 34 resulted in this staggering claim, which the mainstream media wants us to believe is representative of that particular segment of the population. It reminds us of the adage “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.”
So we did some checking and discovered that in the United States as of 2021 the population of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 was roughly 60 million people (out of over 280 million). Though no matter which graph or census count is used, the point is that a sample of one thousand of these folks is minuscule and should not be believed.
Yet such numbers, whether accurate or not, are used for the manipulation of the public and are reported by the media as representative of the mainstream opinions of our citizenry. Projections like these are propaganda, pure and simple.
The victims of these repetitious deceptions are our young people. So rather than playing with numbers, we should be considering the actual human beings whose lives are destroyed by America’s national obsession with sin, including the demand for what is euphemistically called permanent contraception. This is actually sterilization—a word being recast in more appealing language by those who detest babies, families, and wholesome values.
Apparently saying sterilization sounds too crass, so the gentler phrase is used. But the result is still the same: sterility. Either way, the media say this is so because since the Dobbs decision, increases in these procedures are through the roof. But why? Because remaining chaste before marriage and faithful after marriage has become passe in a world absorbed with self-gratification.
Writing about this, Brad Littlejohn opined:
Americans are still conservative in a sense, but it is now radical individualism and materialism that many want to conserve. For decades they’ve soaked in that worldview, from influences as different as Supreme Court decisions and Seinfeld episodes. The median voter, then, will still go to the ballot to protest runaway immigration, for that is a disruption of the world he knows, but he will not go to the ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.
Commenting on this sobering reality, Stephen White writes: “The successive (and seemingly accelerating) pace of cultural change means that each generation comes of age with a sense of what is normal which is very different from the previous generation. Which means that to “conserve” the familiar values and norms on which one was raised changes meaning dramatically from one generation to the next.”
Today the familiar values and norms are no longer consonant with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Rather, they are the fruits of man’s insatiable appetite for perversion and self-satisfaction.
There is no simple remedy for a disease of this sort short of the persistent, consistent, and insistent plea to respect life as a gift, cherish it in yourself and others, and affirm it in the way you help your fellow man learn the truth. We are not animals; we are human beings created in the image and likeness of God—a God who loves us no matter what!
As we consider the loss of moral sanity that is gripping so many people, let us reflect on these beautiful words written by Saint John Paul II in his Letter to Families:
Human beings are not the same thing as the images proposed in advertising and shown by the modern mass media. They are much more, in their physical and psychic unity, as composites of soul and body, as persons. They are much more because of their vocation to love, which introduces them as male and female into the realm of the “great mystery.”
This is the mystery that heals moral insanity.
