This is such a good blog piece by Fr. Steven Freeman that I simply must link and share it with my comments.

This paragraph struck me with force:

The British political thinker, Edmund Burke (1730-1797), is often considered one of the fathers of conservatism. He was not opposed to change, but was deeply aware of the “law of unintended consequences.” When something is changed, everything is changed to some extent. Only time will reveal whether the sum total will have been an improvement or a disaster. His philosophy of governance was thus, “Go slowly.” 

This is the battle we are fighting on so many fronts now in our culture. The odd thing about this battle is that we do have the benefit of time and experience to draw upon and see if the changes we are making are beneficial or not. We now know that what was a new and, at that time, exciting push to change sexual morality, spearheaded by Playboy magazine, has been an unmitigated disaster. Statistics are piled deep which attest to the divorces, STDs, suicides, sterility, and growth in abortion which has come from relinquishing all traditional moral restraints upon our sexual expression.

I was a young man when that ignoble experiment on human relationships began, and I watched it unfold with dizzying speed. No one was suggesting “go slowly” as Playboy pushed every boundary apart, and like a dam in front of a million gallons of water giving way, unleashed a powerful and deadly torrent of change which no one has been able to restrain to this point. To my deep regret, I was one of the people eagerly pushing the twisted ideas without any thought for what they might mean. Even after several bouts with STDs,  so profoundly was I caught in the web of my unrestrained passions that in my pride I would not consider that I was wrong. The insanity of my life, my bitter experiences over time, should have brought me to look over the results of my behavior and realize, “Hey,  I need to stop this. This ain’t going well.” But I was trapped, and only the grace of God was able to rescue me from a life that had become so wretched that I had begun to seriously have thoughts of  suicide by the time I heard the Gospel message of God’s love and repented.

In the United States, we are facing a similar situation. Father Dwight Longenecker wrote a splendid blog piece, Modern America: A Disneyland Dystopia, which should be mandatory reading once every year for the four years of a student’s high school. In this piece, Father Longenecker outlines clearly the results of a century of pushing aside all restraints and charging like a bull into the future without pause to consider the ramifications of our choices.

To bring this closer to home, here in Fairfax County, Virginia, we are facing a school board that simply will not listen to the wisdom, the science, the evidence, and the fractured lives left in the wake of sixty years of the Playboy philosophy. Not only are the united members of the school board aggressively pushing the twisted sexual agenda of the LGBTQ and Transgender communities (if less than 3% of the population qualifies as a “community” rather than a loose-knit compendium of people with severe psychological problems who need help), but they routinely break the law to push their agendas and ignore the testimonies of many who have spoken at school board meetings to oppose this harmful nonsense. I have addressed the school board twice on this issue, inviting them to correspond with me in regards to these issues:

 

 

The response to my invitation to speak with me:  crickets chirping.

Sandy Evans is the worst of the bunch. She has violated laws which regulate the operating of the school board, there is a recall effort out to try to remove her from her seat, and yet everything pushes on without restraint. It is hard for me to understand how these men and women, whose position is one in which the lives and futures of children are very much in their hands, can ignore decades of evidence against sexual immorality and continue to push this downward spiral. When I think of the damage these promoters of hedonism without consequence are doing, I become enraged. They are violating a sacred trust given to them by the parents of the students who are going to needlessly suffer from this agenda.

The worst part is this: there are some decisions which can be reversed. Bad effects can be overcome, and the earlier a mistake is corrected, the less damage it will do.  But after sixty years of unrestrained immorality, I am afraid that we may have reached the point of no return. The comfortable rich and middle-class in America don’t care. They are insulated from the reality of the destruction that such behaviors are causing.

It will be up to another generation to pick up the pieces – if there are pieces left to pick up.