Went traveling north this past weekend, to a place Rick Barnett calls the Fourth Circle (of hell, I presume), otherwise known as Atlanta. On the drive up I had hoped to take in the scenery where deserving and forget about everything else. It can't be done. Amidst the cows in the pasture and the rolls of bailed hay in the fields, between the golf courses and the horse farms, stand constant reminders of the cultural divide. I believe the first appeal to sexual squalor appeared just south of Gainesville, approaching Micanopy, on a sign advertising the Café Risque: "We Show All! Truckers welcome! Showers available." A hundred yards further on, a beautiful baby's face appears on another sign: "From conception to heartbeat in 18 days. Pregnancy help," followed by a phone number. Then one more sign for the strip joint and another for the baby: "Pregnant and alone? Know your options," and, of course, the phone number. There was even a .com address, but I can't remember what it was.
I saw these off and on throughout the trip, sometimes rearing out of a thick stand of oak or pine, sometimes planted on the edge of a white stretch of cottonfield, like a flattened cloud facing skyward. Don't recall having seen that before. Maybe they have to rotate it against the corn in Florida and the peanuts in Georgia. In the south part of the peach state we saw an advertisement for the Jade Spa, adorned by a picture of a pretty Asian girl above the words, "Large parking lot," which could only be another appeal to those tormented truckers (so much temptation, so little time to stay on schedule) of whom the sex industry must have a low opinion. Soon after, another sign said "All American Spa," again adorned by the same pretty Asian. I told my wife that something was fishy. She agreed. But again, amongst these would appear the baby signs, one claiming that "Every 22 seconds, abortion claims another life." 1-800-848-LOVE. I think it was on the way home that we saw - following fast upon an inducement to visit the XAdult Superstore - a picture of an attractive, bearded man in white robes among the clouds standing beside a question: "Have you come to a decision yet?" - Jesus Christ. Another was somewhere in Florida: "America needs a faithlift."
After some reflection - a thing I was trying to escape by traveling - I came to the conclusion that we have basically two cultures in America: one wants to make the world safe for whorehouses, while the other wants to save the world. The former culture is buttressed by an enormous intellectual support system in the government and the academy, not all of whose members would themselves visit a whorehouse (lacking the courage of their convictions), but will defend to the death your right to do so. I assume, given the current state of affairs, all the whores will now be compelled to purchase government mandated health insurance offering contraceptives, sterilization and abortion to facilitate the practice of worry-free prostitution. The other culture will be standing by to catch the babies who slip the dragnet.
As far as I know, prostitution is still illegal in most places. Assuming no actual prostitution takes place in the above-mentioned establishments, the signs along the highway are there because inciting lust is legal, but acting upon it is not - if money changes hands, that is. But a prostitute is nothing more than a paid slut. Most parents, even of the very liberal sort, do not want their daughters branded as whores or sluts. I've heard that such accusations hurled in methodical fashion at teenage girls on social networking sites have caused a few to commit suicide. But why the shame, why the stigma? One of those liberal parents, President Obama (and the father of teenage daughters), is a fervent promoter of that great lust-enabler, contraception. In fact, he wants all of us to pay for other people's use of it. Does he imagine that its only users are responsible, highly disciplined people who are mostly ascetic in their sexual habits, that none are, or will become, sluts or whores? He supports with equal fervor organizations like Planned Parenthood, whose philosophy of sex is somewhat at odds with the Christian sort, even though he calls himself a Christian. PP believes that teenagers have an autonomous right to sexual self-expression. If a girl wants to hook up with a different guy every week, what is that to the President as long her sex is safe? (Safe for her, that is, not for any fetal interlopers.) By the way, how many sexual partners must a girl have before she achieves official slutdom? Is there a specific threshold? The President hasn't spoken to the matter, but I think he should.
We tell our young people these days that sex is sacred, but in a sense very different from its former meaning. It's not the sex itself that's sacred, but your right to indulge it. We reinforce this by defending the legality of pornography as the exercise of another sacred right, the one to free speech. On a pedestal of principle we elevate the squalid. But just as whores are paid sluts, porn stars are just whores. We cast a protective legal shroud about the former, but not the latter, even though they're the same. Our kids may be stupid, but they're not that stupid. They see it. Unfortunately, some of them want to join the cause without the labels. The stigma remains.
It's probably the fault of that other culture, the one that wants to tell the whores to "go, and sin no more," the one that wants to save the babies, save the world. It still exerts a residual force on the collective conscience, inhibiting our journey toward the paradise of guilt-free, child-free, disease-free sexual license, and for which it is thoroughly despised and hated.
It looks to me like a war between the come-to-Jesus culture and the come-to-Jezebel. I'm putting my hope in the Jesus culture, my money on Jezebel.
Other than that, I had a fairly pleasant trip. I got to see a beautiful daughter and hold her tight.
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