By Jennifer Hartline
In case there’s any doubt, it’s not true that Americans don’t worship. We are indeed still a nation that faithfully goes to the altar to worship and give our lives. We give our money and our time, and we choose our leaders accordingly. Some things are worth protecting and defending, so we make darn sure the important things are kept safe.
What has changed is the object of our worship. No longer is the one we adore holy and all-powerful. No longer is our master a loving and merciful one. We have a new god.
Sex is a new false god. Our society worships at the altar of sex, and by extension, the altar of abortion. Every part of our daily lives seems to glorify and revolve around sex. There is no escaping the pervasive presence of indulgent sex. It has infiltrated every corner of our culture, and radically changed the way we view ourselves and the way we treat each other.
Satan has so skillfully enslaved us in a prison of self-centeredness and obsession with sex that he no longer has to convince us to come to this altar —we come running of our own volition. We can’t get enough sex. Bondage tastes like freedom on our tongues and we beg for more. We are addicted to our lethal injection.
St. Paul warns us so specifically about sexual sin because it is so uniquely effective in destroying us from the inside out. “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:18-20).”
The worst damage we inflict on ourselves isn’t physical; it’s mental and spiritual. When everything we say and do is viewed through the lens of sexuality we reduce ourselves to animals without souls or higher reasoning. We turn our wills over to the greedy whims of physical desire, so that the final goal of every decision is our own pleasure.
We lose our ability to think! We lose our ability to determine right from wrong and the power to choose anything contrary to the insatiable demands of physical satisfaction. We no longer see our own soul, let alone the soul of another. People can be used and discarded and life can be destroyed, as long as the sex god is appeased and revered.
We are completely, thoroughly saturated with sex. Our old boundaries of propriety, modesty and discretion have been completely broken down and paved through with highways of constant visual titillation. What once seemed outrageous is now normal. What once caused us to blush with embarrassment now elicits applause. What we once would have shunned, we embrace in the spirit of enlightenment and progress.
What we once called evil is now good. Satan doesn’t have to destroy us; he simply has to persuade us the fruit of the tree is all we’ve ever dreamed of, and we will gladly destroy ourselves. He has, and we are. We are even willing and eager to sacrifice our children on this altar.
In fact, our society is structured so that our children are virtually guaranteed to offer themselves on the altar of sex and abortion. Massive, obscene amounts of money are spent making sure our kids are bombarded with sexual imagery, sexual music, sexual movies, sexual books, sexual everything until they are convinced of their sacrosanct “right” to gratify themselves in every way possible without restriction or consequence.
Thus a new generation of worshipers is molded and the peddlers of deadly sex have enough loyal customers to keep them in business. The chief peddler of our time is Planned Parenthood. PP has a vested interest in making sure our teenagers are as sexually active as possible. They want our kids to “need” contraception and “need” treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and ultimately, to “need” abortion. If young people were to stop having promiscuous sex, PP would soon go out of business, and they won't let that happen. They must sell their “reproductive health services” to the next generation if they are to stay profitable.
PP says their mission is to provide help, information, medical care, and to protect women. Bull. Their ignoble “business” is the corruption of our kids. Their solvency is secured through the killing of children in the womb. They profit off the diseases and heartache our children suffer because they have done exactly what PP wanted them to do in the first place: have lots of sex.
A chaste couple waiting to have sex until marriage has no need for PP's services. Single women who use the common sense God gave them and refrain from sex don't need PP for anything. Teenagers who are encouraged to cherish their virginity, to treat each other with respect and care for their own bodies … properly have no need for anything PP has to offer. PP knows this. They know that modesty, abstinence, respect, virtue, and self-control are their enemies, and so their goal is to break down the innocence and purity of our kids as early as possible, to indoctrinate them into the immoral mindset that pushes them into having sex young and often, and then bullies them into believing abortion is the answer.
We cannot effectively address the evil of abortion in the U.S. until we confront our culture’s worship of sex and the attack on our children’s innocence. The remedy is a sexual counter-revolution, led by people of moral courage and virtue. The blind cannot lead the blind.
Using a condom does not protect the heart or the mind from the lingering effects of unmarried sex. The Pill will not protect a young lady's heart or her self-respect after she has been used for pleasure and then discarded. Killing the new life in the womb will not preserve a woman's future or her freedom. We cannot shrink from conveying that truth to society.
Where is the plain talk about sex? Where is the truth about sexual relations, about male and female differences, about making love, about marriage and family? No honest person can deny the multi-dimensional effects of promiscuous sex. The evidence is incontrovertible: Children everywhere without fathers, and young mothers without husbands. Young people grow up with no concept of commitment and no idea what love really looks like. Teenagers are taught to “explore” their sexuality, told that sexual exploits are normal, healthy, and part of finding out who they are, while all along the way they are infected with diseases and catapulted into parenthood long before they are ready, because the only armor we gave them was a piece of latex. 


The risks of promiscuous sex are so great, and the point is, they are risks no one HAS to take. The dangers can be completely avoided. People who abstain will not get STDs. They will not “need” abortions. They will not create single-parent families that struggle to survive. On the contrary, people who abstain, who wait for marriage, will be physically healthy, emotionally healthy, and will more surely have a stable foundation on which to build a family.
Yet, I know many people are already saying, “Teenagers are going to have sex no matter what we do. Unmarried people are going to have sex no matter what the Church or anyone else says. Abstinence doesn't work.” Planned Parenthood insists kids are going to do it anyway, so we need to supply them with condoms to keep them “safe.” So says the industry that would cease to exist if people stopped making illicit sex a lifestyle.
It is a lazy cop-out to say, “Well, they're gonna do it no matter what I say…” Sure, they just might. That's true. They might also take the car keys without your permission when they don't have a driver's license and go cruising, but I don't hear anyone arguing that we should pretend not to notice. They might also listen, watch, learn, and change—if they saw their parents showing them how.
It is sheer madness not to teach abstinence. It is the only way to protect our kids from the numerous, serious risks of unmarried sexual activity, but instead we goad them into behavior that can literally change their lives in an instant.
It simply makes no sense whatsoever not to put the full weight of our country’s resources and our energy behind a nationwide abstinence campaign. We haven't done that yet, so we can't sit back and say it won't work. We haven't tried.
We won’t keep every teenager from having sex, but we can impact a huge number of them with the truth about sex, the truth about love and commitment, the truth about human life, and protect them from the manifold dangers that come with unmarried sex. We could begin to change our culture and restore our children’s dignity and wholeness. Or we could just keep sacrificing them on the altar of sex.
We know what Planned Parenthood wants.
Jennifer Hartline is a Catholic Army wife and stay-at-home mother of three precious kids who writes frequently on topics of Catholic faith and daily living. She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online. Article provided by Catholic.org.
For more information on Planned Parenthood and Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP), a project of American Life League, please visit www.stopp.org.
