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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Let's All Cruise On Down To Stupidville


Some young football heros in the town of Steubenville, Ohio have garnered a great deal of attention in the news recently. In August of 2012 these boys raped a sixteen-year-old girl at a party while others watched, took photos and video, and even posted the activity on their Facebook pages.  Everyone agrees this was an act of real stupidity. The perpetrators of the actual rape have been found guilty and sentenced to serve time. The Ohio Attorney General has plans to consider charges against those who watched or knew of the crime and failed to come forward or even cooperate with the police investigation.  It looks like he has a good case against some.  School officials who knew of the event had a responsibility to report it and didn’t under the law. The rest of those who failed so miserably to meet a moral standard of common decency will likely not suffer any consequence, because in America you generally aren’t required to do the right thing, like report a crime.

Why is this at all important?  Are we that bad in the United States?  I suspect we generally report crimes pretty effectively. And unless they are being under-reported, it also appears our statistics on rape are not as bad as much of the world.  Compared to France, for instance, they have over 300 times the number of rapes the U.S. has.  Is it that we don’t report rape?  Pakistan says they have no rapes at all in their country. Perhaps they don’t report rape because the woman will be blamed and stoned to death.  Or maybe their habit of dressing in a way that completely covers a woman makes them uninteresting to a would-be rapist. There is no easy answer as to why the statistics vary so much, but one thing is certain. In this instance in Ohio, we were shown a microcosm view of how many of our youth view sex, and how the effect of drugs, alcohol, media, social pressures, poor parenting and the like are affecting our society. 

A few months ago I worked at a Health Fair in front of the cafeteria of the local high school. Across from my display was a pair of cute fifteen-year-old girls demonstrating at their display table how to put a condom on a banana. Perhaps we are sexualizing our youth in ways we never dreamed possible in our continuing politically correct ways of educating them.  One in every four teens has a sexually transmitted disease.  I understand the importance of preventing that.  However, we are emphasizing prevention of disease and pregnancy, and essentially still ratifying the appropriateness of sexual freedom.  In Steubenville’s case it unfortunately was the freedom to rape.

Sadly, in another setting I remember listening to one adult say that doing drugs and alcohol was just a rite of passage for our youth, and another who said they knew people who had sponsored alcohol parties for the underage kids. I also remember listening to my son recently say to me that every girl he knew in his high school class was pregnant out of wedlock within two years of graduation.  Even if his social strata sample is a skewed one, it still is a completely unacceptable and disturbing story.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is also a serious moral and faith based problem in western society where belief in God and adherence to biblical teaching is decreasing every day. Western Europe has been leading the way, and the U.S. is rapidly following suit.

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