What Road Will We Choose?
June 15, 2009 by Standing on Truth
Filed under Culture
We are at a crossroads. We are standing at the intersection of two radically different ideologies and being pulled, pushed, coerced, and encouraged to go in one of these two directions (depending on where the pressure is coming from). The question at hand is: Will the traditional family survive or will it crumble? What road will we choose?
Jimmy Evans, founder of Marriage Today, calls our attention to a Harvard sociologist named Carle Zimmerman in his article “The Harvard Prophecy.” He says that Zimmerman
“published a report called The Family and Civilization. In his report, he documented that major civilizations from long ago had begun and ended in almost identical ways related to the family and its relation to the social infrastructure. He found that virtually every major civilization that arose–Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Greek, Roman, and Western–all began with a strong family unit resembling the biblical model. He also found that the downfall of each society was directly associated with the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family unit.”
The definition of a traditional family (including traditional marriage) is under attack. If you were to turn on nearly any news station, you would hear yet another culture-war over marriage and family at some point during the day. Although, according to a recent Gallup poll, a majority of 57% of Americans still oppose gay marriage, that number has dropped significantly in the last decade. What road will we choose?
At the risk of being unpopular as I speculate about this, when I first heard that President Obama was encouraging moms to go back to school, I thought this could potentially be yet another thing that drives apart traditional families. And while I won’t ascribe any impure motives to President Obama, and while I certainly don’t discourage higher education for any man or woman in many circumstances, taking stay-at-home mothers away from their children by enticing them with financial help is, in my opinion, another defeat for the nuclear family. What road will we choose?
This past Mother’s Day, I learned about the objection that the United Nations has to our celebration on this day. Their “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) basically has declared Mother’s Day to be sexist. ”The Committee is concerned by the continuing prevalence of sex-role stereotypes and by the reintroduction of such symbols as a Mothers’ Day and Mothers’ Day Award, which it sees as encouraging women’s traditional roles.” This is shocking to me! But you may ask, “Why do we care what the U.N. does?” Well, in most cases, I wish we didn’t but let me remind you about another issue involving the family that some in our government want the U.N. to dictate. The U.N.C.R.C. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child essentially says that a U.N. Committee could determine how you parent your children, and it has grabbed the attention of the Obama Administration and Democrat-led Congress. What road will we choose?
“Out-of-Wedlock Birthrates are Soaring” says one news article, with “4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States in 2007″ being born to unmarried mothers.
“Census: 6.4 Million Cohabitating Couples. . .” says another source, which equals 10% of all couples.
“The Rise of Child Abuse as a Result of Abortion” by Randy Alcorn
“Is Marriage in Jeopardy” by Glenn T. Stanton
What road will we choose?
My concern is with the overall attitude towards and acceptance of these ideologies and lifestyles. Little by little we are chipping away at traditional marriage and family. Each day that we choose to turn our faces away from what is happening before our very eyes and stay ignorant or uninvolved is a day we might lose a foundational and transformational element of our society.
