close your eyes

The Standard of Liberty Voice
For God,Religion,Family,Freedom
A publication of The Standard of Liberty Foundation
www.standardofliberty.org
August 11, 2005, #5

Close Your Eyes, I’m Coming Through!

My grandpa had a funny little joke he played on his daughters. They had a 3-bedroom house and a big family. The rooms had to be used for multiple purposes such as storage. If he had to come through the girls’ room, as a show of respect for their privacy, he’d say, “Close your eyes, I’m coming through!” In other words, what you can’t see won’t hurt you. But of course they knew he was just kidding.

This morning I heard Jackie Leavitt on a radio show talking up her Internet Keep Safe Coalition, all about how parents must protect their children from the bad stuff on the Internet like pornography and sexual solicitation. Her program encourages installing filters on home computers, keeping the computer in a family area, etc., all those rules we’ve heard a hundred times. It’s the new stranger danger that comes right through your walls, she said.

Thank you, yes, we all should put the filters on our computers which does something to protect our families. But we can’t stop there. There’s a much bigger problem. We the people have stood by and allowed pornography to become mainstream. Pulling the shades down doesn’t mean the storm isn’t raging outside. Closing our eyes doesn’t mean the enemy isn’t on our doorstep. Jackie’s strategy, if what she’s doing is all there is, will get us nowhere as a society. You can’t win a game if all you’re concentrating on is defense– you’ll never score any points or throw any punches. You’ll just get worn out blocking and stalling until you eventually lose to the offensive team or opponent simply because they found a way around your defenses and got points, while you didn’t. In boxing, if all you do is protect yourself, even if you never get knocked out, the judges will give the match to the guy who was actually trying to win. You’ll lose, that’s all there is to it. When our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, yes, we put homeland security in place, but at the same time we went after our enemies, fighting them on their own turf.

All this emphasis on blocks and filters has its dangers because we are prone to develop a smugness, and a false sense of security. Also lacking is concern for our fellow men and the very real general direction our society is taking which will affect us and our posterity. Actually, we’re being distracted from the real problem. The societal revolutionists are laughing at us in all our pious zeal as we push our Internet awareness and prevention programs, because the porn industry is not going out of business, not in this world. On the contrary, it’s expanding its reach and pushing its envelope, charting new territory for conquest. Internet porn is geared to maintain addicts and recruit kids. And filters or not, they find ways. We are incredibly naive if we think installing filters on our home computers is going to negatively affect the billion-dollar wave of porn as it maintains this generation’s sexual deviants and trains the next. We’re incredibly naive if we think that by installing filters our families won’t be affected by pornography. Whether or not our children see it, they will be greatly affected by those who do.

So what do we do? I liked Russell Crowe’s line from the movie “Cinderella Man,” “You can’t punch what you can’t see.” We must open our eyes. Once we face the reality of what’s happening we can fight this enemy on many levels. But to be most effective, we must be on God’s side. Rather than relying solely on the Bandaids of Internet filters and the like, how about emphasizing to our kids that they are infinitely valued beings loved by God, that the Spirit of goodness and truth can be the guiding force in their lives? In this way, our children will be prepared to more readily recognize and turn away from evil in any form. In this way, we adults will have the confidence to stand for truth and righteousness in the public forum.

Unless we move our families into caves, we will continue to be fed what C.S. Lewis even back in the 1950s called “a diet of good solid lies about sex.” Instead of merely closing our eyes, we have an obligation to pro-actively stand against and counteract the destructive material and false ideas pouring out of the oversexed, omnisexualized part of our world.

-Stephen & Janice Graham

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