Glamorizing Illegitimacy
Hollywood. It’s cool. It’s chic. It oozes glam and glitz. But the truth is that all that glitters from Hollywood is not gold.
“Out-of-wedlock births. Shotgun weddings. Catch phrases for ‘illegitimate’ pregnancies (and the quickie nuptials that may follow) have an almost criminal ring to them. But Hollywood has set to work changing the stigma of premarital babies” (Fox News, Nov. 10, 2005).
As the Fox News article wryly pointed out, a baby has replaced the diminutive, ornamented puppy as a fashion accessory to metrosexual Hollywood. Now the unmarried, star-crusted Hollywood scene is burgeoning with chips off the block—with household names like Cruise, Paltrow and Ledger.
The message is clear: Unwed parenting is something to celebrate.
But Hollywood is merely showcasing what is actually a growing social trend. For instance, according to Maclean’s, Canada has more than 1 million single-parent families. The National Center for Health Statistics says that extramarital births in the United States have risen 8 percent since 2003, producing 1.5 million born to unwed parents in 2004—a mind-numbing 34 percent of all births.
“The entire phenomenon (in the real world and Hollywood) concerns marriage scholars, who say a volume of studies have shown two worrying findings: Marriages are more likely to crumble when cohabitation or children come before the walk down the aisle. And more troubles—including teen pregnancy, depression, drug use and dropping out of school—befall children who aren’t raised by both natural parents, according to the National Marriage Project” (Fox News, op. cit.).
It doesn’t take a genius to realize what statistics prove: that premarital sex produces single-parent families. But statistics don’t solve the puzzle of why unwed pregnancy, and why the Hollywood “love child” is such a fad. The answer is shocking and little-thought-of by academics and parents alike: The world has lost the art of proper dating.
The knowledge of how proper dating contributes to a healthy and happy society is completely missing. No one in higher government knows the how and why about right dating. Hollywood does not know. Yet, the need to know about the right and proper uses of sex and dating is universal. The statistics illuminate this irrefutable point.
There is a missing dimension in sex knowledge. This missing dimension is causing the talented men and women of Hollywood, of America and elsewhere to make many life-changing mistakes—mistakes that are contributing to the collapse of Western society.
To the skeptic, right dating principles may seem like a trite, oversimplified solution. But you can prove this is true. Read The Missing Dimension in Sex by Herbert W. Armstrong.
