People are looking at lots of pornography. A recent ranking puts four pornography sites among the top 25 websites in the entire world. The most popular pornography website has more than 3 billion visits per month, more than Amazon or Netflix. And the other top sites (like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Bing, Yahoo, Netflix) are also serving enormous amounts of “semi-pornographic” images and videos. Even news sites (including some “conservative” ones) often feature celebrity news on the front page as an excuse to feature sexualized images. A large percentage of advertisements also feature images of partially unclothed women.

Sexually explicit content is so common that some high schools now teach students how to view it in a “healthy” way.

The New York Times reported last year that some students as young as 15 in Massachusetts high schools have been taking “Porn Literacy” classes (“What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn,” Feb. 7, 2018). For two hours a week, over a five-week period, about two dozen students took part in the class, which is “neither anti-porn nor pro-porn,” according to the Boston Public Health Commission. The Times said the class “aims to make them savvier, more critical consumers of porn by examining how gender, sexuality, aggression, consent, race, queer sex, relationship and body images are portrayed … in porn.”

This passes for “education” today. So many young people now view sexual photos and videos so often that some teachers believe they should help students view it more “responsibly.” The thought is: Pornography may have its dangers, but if state education boards are involved, children can be taught to consume it in a “healthy” way.

The Porn Literacy course “is grounded in the reality that most adolescents do see porn,” the Times wrote, and it “takes the approach that teaching them to analyze its messages is far more effective than simply wishing our children could live in a porn-free world.”

Does this defeatist approach, which legitimizes child sexual activity, sound familiar?

In the 1990s, some educators said that so many children in high school (and younger) were having sexual intercourse that schools should distribute birth control to teenagers. The reasoning was, everyone does it, so we will teach them to do it in a “safe” way.

Now we’ve moved on to teaching children how to view porn “responsibly.”

The Times wrote about how porn distributors make it incredibly easy for minors to access porn. “The mainstream websites aren’t verifying your age, and your phone allows you to watch porn away from the scrutinizing eyes of adults. If you still have parental-control filters, you probably have ways around them.”

Children are going to find a way to get to it one way or the other. Parents should accept reality! Incorporate it into high school curriculum. That is the reasoning.

This is unconditional surrender to satanic debauchery!

Parents are not teaching their children about love, marriage and sex. So we are beginning to leave that to pornography and Porn Literacy class.

The Times reported that sex educators have even “created a porn-education website for parents” (emphasis added throughout). One of the website’s primary creators is a feminist producer of pornography. She said, “We have given our children technology, so we need to teach them how to handle it.” She even suggested parents should give their children “healthy porn.” When asked if she took this approach with her own daughters, the feminist responded: “I would recommend good sites to my daughters at age 15, when I think they are mature enough. We are so curious to find out about sex. People have doubts and insecurities about themselves sexually. ‘Is it OK that I like that, or this?’ I think porn can be a good thing to have as an outlet. I’m not scared by explicit sex per se. I’m afraid of the bad values.”

She’s not worried about showing her 15-year-old explicit sex scenes. She’s just concerned about bad values. This reminds me of something Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind: “Intractable good and evil cause infinite distress—like war and sexual repression—which is almost instantly relieved when more flexible values are introduced. One need not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary.”

In No Freedom Without Law, my father writes, “Deep down we know that pornography is evil! In the past, even the thought of it caused us shame. At one time we also declared a war on pornography, but we don’t hear much about that war anymore. Why? Because we don’t like admitting defeat.”

As Professor Bloom noted, why should we admit defeat or feel guilty and ashamed when all we need is a little value adjustment?

Calling Evil Good

In the September 2017 issue of Wired magazine, Sarah Fallon wondered how she should bring up her two sons in a porn-culture. She interviewed author Peggy Orenstein, who is currently “working on a book about boys, masculinity, sex, love—and yes, porn,” Fallon wrote.

Orenstein told Fallon, “The first thing I recognized when I started working on the new book was that the question to ask boys is not whether or if they watch porn. The question is, when was the first time they saw it?”

Their conversation bounced between the pros and cons of pornography and eventually ended with this comment from Orenstein: “The biggest surprise for me as a parent has been how hard we now have to work to protect our kids’ imaginations from predatory, addictive websites that want to sell things to them—or sell them to advertisers. So you have to lay the groundwork, to have conversations about what’s real and what’s not. Talk about how, when you see a movie, there’s violence, but that violence is totally unrealistic. Porn is really only the extreme end of an issue. We know these things are fake, that’s not the way the two people really interact. Kids have to be able to contextualize, to deconstruct it. Just like they need to do with other forms of media.”

The “best advice” the so-called authorities can offer parents is to accept that your children will see pornography. Just make sure they understand it is the extreme and is not real life. It’s just like watching any action movie. There may even be some benefits from it, too.

There are zero benefits and huge consequences for boys and young men who consume addictive pornographic filth that reduces women to objects, weakens the will of men, robs them of true masculinity, destroys marriages and families, and gives children a twisted and perverted view of the God-ordained purposes for marriage and sex.

Who is even sounding the alarm anymore about the great damage caused by pornography? When the Atlantic’s Matt Kessler wrote about pornography in December 2017, he was alarmed by the negative impact of streaming billions of porn videos. Not the direct destructive effects on millions of minds, but the indirect destructive effects on the environment.

Pornography is the most popular content on the Internet and the Atlantic’s main concern is about its impact on carbon footprints and climate change!

No one seems to care about how this avalanche of filth is destroying our marriages and our children! An appalling 43 percent of Americans now believe that pornography is moral. We think we can redefine the traditional family and biblical morality and avoid the dreadful consequences of sin. But there is cause and effect. And the effects of our sinful living are there for everyone with eyes to see.

God says, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20). In Isaiah 29:15-16, the prophet again says we turn things upside-down and call evil good.

Human nature desperately wants to be good, which is why we are making so many “value adjustments” in the last days.

God says these days are evil! (2 Timothy 3:1-5). He says our nations are terminally ill. “[T]he whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment” (Isaiah 1:5-6).

America is decaying because of its rotten morals—and no one can offer a “sound” solution! Many people don’t even see the problems! Isaiah later writes that “they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. Woe unto their soul! for they have rewarded evil unto themselves” (Isaiah 3:9).

Our nation glorifies its use of pornography and spews that filth all around the world.

In the book of Ezekiel, God likens the sins of our nations to “scum” (see Ezekiel 24:1-14). My father writes in his book Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet: “[God] says our sin is like rust or green corrosion—it clings to our people, and it seems you can’t get it off unless you burn it off! That is indeed what God will do if they don’t heed this message.” (To thoroughly understand God’s view on the subject, please read Chapter 11 of Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet. Order your free copy or download it online.)

Even secular history offers a thunderous warning for our day. Historian Edward Gibbon said that the root cause for the collapse of the Roman Empire was their loss of civic virtue and individual morality. Gibbon believed the laws of morality were as constant as the laws of mathematics and physics. Most people believe that our societies are too sophisticated, modern and enlightened to collapse under the weight of what God defines as sin and immorality.

But we would do well to heed the warnings of the past. It is often said, if we fail to learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, the only thing we seem to learn from history is that we never seem to learn from it. We are fast going the way of Rome and Sodom.

But there is hope for individuals willing to humble themselves before the mighty hand of God (1 Peter 5:6). In his book The Missing Dimension in Sex, 20th-century educator Herbert W. Armstrong wrote: “Sex was designed and created in humans for purposes other than reproduction—for purposes totally foreign to animal or plant life! But the world has continued in unhappy and wretched ignorance of these glorious and God-bestowed purposes!”

The reason our culture is so confused when it comes to the subject of sex is because it has rejected the Creator of sex and what He teaches in the Bible. In a December 2017 Key of David program, my father explained the divine purposes of sex as defined in the Bible. He also pointed out why society has it so backward: “[I]f you look at educators and scientists and psychologists today, they talk about moral standards and all of that, but they believe in evolution. They do not know the origin and purposes of sex. They don’t know the origin of marriage. They do not know! Well, it’s very clear if you believe the Bible. But if you reject the Bible, you’re just relying on human reasoning, and that’s going to bring you disaster. That’s what’s bringing this world disaster! And our number one problem today is that of human survival because we’re relying on the human mind and not God’s thinking.”

There is a reason God made us male and female and then ordained the institutions of marriage and family! Mr. Armstrong’s book The Missing Dimension in Sex is based on biblical morality. It is the best teaching tool any parent could ever use to educate their children about love, marriage and sex. Use Mr. Armstrong’s book along with your Bible to understand the incredible purpose God is working out here below. If you apply the material, it will bring fathomless joy and meaning into your marriage and family!