August 8, 2014
My daughter-in-law recently
returned from a trip to New York City.
She stayed in a hotel not far from Times Square. As she described her experience there, I was
taken aback by how dismayed and disgusted she was with what she observed. Blatant homosexuality was the norm on the
streets. “At times I wondered if there
was a straight man in the area.” The
dress and conduct she saw all around her was summed up by her use of the word
“depraved.” She saw young women walking
the streets dressed in body paint – literally.
They wore no clothes, only the body paint. She said she really felt like she was walking
around in Sodom and Gomorrah.
I share her anecdotal take on New
York City because I believe it illustrates why the morals in our country
continue their downward spiral. Much of
our news and entertainment come from New York and Los Angeles. These cesspools see conduct as normal that
still shocks and puts off many who live in other parts of the country.
As a recent example, I just
finished reading an article in the LA Times bemoaning the fact that the porn
industry was moving out of Los Angeles because local lawmakers had passed an
ordinance requiring all male actors to wear a condom. Nowhere in the article was there any problem
expressed with sexually explicit material being made; quite the opposite. What was being bemoaned was that porn
producers were moving to other counties in California, and even other
countries, to make their movies.
Apparently viewers of porn don’t like their actors using condoms, so the
productions were being moved where that wasn’t required by law. In the article, the making of pornographic
movies was reported like the “normal” everyday activity it has become in that
part of the country. Some folks film TV
mysteries, some make porn. To the LA
Times, it’s just another job.
I’ve had numerous people lament
to me about the filthy language in so many movies today. A couple I know got up and walked out of a
film about a sixties singing group recently because the language was so
obscene. And, as they observed, it
didn’t have to be that way. The filthy
language absolutely ruined what would otherwise have been an enjoyable show.
I’m convinced the reason for the
filth we see in TV and movies is because the makers of this material live and
work in an unbelievably (to us) filthy environment. It is normal to them for people in
conversation to use the “F” word incessantly.
When Martin Scorsese uses the “F” word an appalling 506 times in The Wolf of Wall Street (which, by the
way, someone figured out worked out to once every twenty seconds!) he wasn’t trying to shock or titillate,
he was merely reflecting what was, to him, normal conversation in that realm. When you wade in a sewer you stink. It’s just that you’re so used to the odor its
normal to you.
I believe this helps to explain
why there is the, otherwise inexplicable, emphasis on sexual deviancy in
television and the movies. In New York
and LA you find concentrations of LGBT folks way higher than the national
average. This is why the “norm” portrayed
in so many movies and TV shows is so skewed from reality. A recent article in the Washington Post
reported that a study by the Centers for Disease Control revealed only 1.6
percent of adults self-identified as gay or lesbian. Only 0.7 percent identified themselves as
bisexual. Another 1.1 percent came up
with “other” as their sexual identity.
96.6 percent of the respondents labelled themselves as “straight” in
this 2013 survey! So why does the
average American think somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty percent of the
population is gay (according to a recent Fox News survey)?
Census counts reveal
approximately one million self-identified gay and lesbian people living in the
New York and LA metro areas. This
represents nearly twelve percent of the LGBT population of the whole country. Such
a concentration of population in areas which are so influential in shaping our
culture helps to explain the distortion that is so evident. The residents of New York City and Los Angeles
experience every day an abnormal norm. When
they write their sitcoms or give commentary on the news their thinking is
shaped by what they see surrounding them. But what they see daily is not what most
Americans see. Thus, the disconnect.
It is more important than ever
that as Christians we be vocal in sharing the truth about moral matters as
tactfully, but forcefully, as possible. The most effective way to battle that which
is false is with the truth. We have the
truth on our side, and the more people who are exposed to it, the less
influence a small, but highly vocal and visible, segment of our population will
have.
