News from the Culture War

Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.’ Job 2:9

Our culture has become Job’s wife. If your material wealth is taken away, then you should just curse God and die.

[He] offered an economic argument for the efficiency of his clinic. “For every 50 suicide attempts we have one suicide and the others are failing, with huge costs to the National Health Service.”

If you have no more pleasure from life, then you should just curse God, and die.

He couldn’t walk, had no hand function, but constant pain in all of his fingers. He was incontinent, suffered uncontrollable spasms in his legs and upper body and needed 24-hour care. “¦ Dan had tried to commit suicide three times but this was unsuccessful due to his disability. Other than to starve himself, to travel to Switzerland was his only option.

The quotes above are from an article at Pajamas Media highlighting Dignitas, a Swedish suicide clinic. The main point of the article is that the clinic now offers suicide in pairs. If your “significant other” has chosen to die, they will take care of you, as well, at the same time. For there is no point in living if your loved ones have been taken away, right? Maybe we should ask Job. Or maybe we should ask the “Religion of Peace,” that religion that is so able to justify killing their daughters for “staining the family reputation,” by being raped, or caught with their skin exposed, or caught with a male not related to the girl.

Or maybe we should just look in the mirror. After all, abortion sustains our own American culture of death, doesn’t it? Just like the Islamic practice of killing women because they have been raped, we have the practice of killing children so women can freely “give themselves to a man.” Abortion does one thing really well: It removes the responsibility of men for children. According to an article from a recent issue of First Things:

One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64 percent of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.

Does anyone wonder why we have so few children, and so much focus on sex in our culture? Turned this way, it’s easy to see how the sexual nature of our society, itself, is a part of the culture of death. We move from life only being worth living if it’s pleasurable to killing for pleasure in one short step, without even understanding how the two relate. And sexual is about the only way to describe our culture at this point. If water is the last thing a fish can be expected to discover, then love, rather than sex, is the last thing anyone living in the US is likely to discover, for we are swimming in a sea of sex appeal. Brent Bozell, over at Townhall, documents some of the latest lyrics from popular songs. The next time someone says, “But I like the beat!,” ask them if they agree with buying pornography magazines to study the style of photography.

The fashion industry makes fun of modesty and modest dressing—it’s hard to sell clothes once people step off the “what’s sexy now” treadmill. As Newsbusters reports on a recent article from Elle Magazine about a program that teaches young girls modesty:

Faith-based efforts to promote primness can be worrisome; one need only look to Tehran, Kabul and Jerusalem to find the disturbing phenomenon of “˜modesty police.’

At the same time, the Foundry is reporting the US Government pushes to remove any remote possibility that our children will be taught abstinence in public schools, and marriage is collapsing.

Flanagan’s clarion call is backed by demographic trends that have now reached a point where nearly four of every ten babies is born out of wedlock and only half of all teenagers live in intact families. Cause for alarm is also found in a bevy of academic studies revealing the impact of the dissolution of the nuclear family on the life prospects and well-being of adults and their children. Research has clearly shown the physical, emotional, and fiscal benefits that married couples experience, as well as the devastating impact that the decline of the intact family has for the next generation. Compared with peers living with both biological parents, children and youth in other family structures fare worse in terms of academic achievement, mental and emotional health, and problem behavior. A father’s presence and involvement can make a lasting difference in a child’s prospects for life.