Weekday mornings find me rising early, having quiet time devotions with coffee, and helping my wife get the kids up and to the breakfast table. As they eat, I retire upstairs to shower, shave, and get ready for work.
The television in our bedroom will be tuned to the Today show where my wife left it, and I usually change it to either a straight news program or to my favorite reminder of the idyllic life, MeTV’s back-to-back episodes of Leave it to Beaver. At night there is a similar progression of television viewing, only it ends with the Andy Griffith Show.
On a recent morning, before abandoning Today, I watched a report by host Craig Melvin about two U. S. Senators, Democrat Brian Schatz (HI) and Republican Tom Cotton (AR), who have cosponsored a bill to prevent minors from having access to social media. Melvin seemed to agree totally that we have to protect children from what they might find on the internet, as well as the addictive nature of it all. He liked that it was a bipartisan approach by a liberal and a conservative senator. For that I add, Hear! Hear!
With that admirable piece of child-protection legislation in mind, as well as the media kudos it received, I began to wonder why the uproar among media elites at other attempts to protect children. A recent example which stirred the hearts of many came from North Carolina, a story of a drag queen giving a lap dance to a young, teenage girl.
Can you imagine Beaver Cleaver’s teacher, Miss Landers, introducing him to drag queen story hour? What would June think?
And what about education? There is all the uproar lately about conservative legislatures and governors prohibiting school libraries from offering books to young children which feature apologetics for things like Marxism and witchcraft. Why is that bad? They call it book banning. No, book banning does not allow anyone access to certain ideologies or philosophies. It’s not allowing a particular point of view to grace the pages of print or, I suppose, the screen.
Can you imagine a young Opie Taylor being instructed to read, or even offered, a book on Marxist approaches to countering U. S. capitalism by his teacher, Helen Crump?
And there are mislabeled attempts to sway adults as well.
Consider voting. Several states have made attempts or taken measures to secure voting integrity in their election. Examples are those which have cleaned up voter rolls to removed names of many who have not voted in the last several elections, as they likely have moved and not reregistered. Others have passed laws requiring photo identification before a citizen is handed a ballot at the polls.
Critics scream voter suppression, Jim Crow, KKK, and other alarming terms in order to strike fear into the minds of minority citizens who lived, truly lived, with such things only a generation ago. All the while voter turnout in states such as Georgia in 2022 actually exceeded that of previous years.
What we face is a widespread disinformation buzz which seeks to label right as ‘wrong’ and wrong as ‘right.’
Such use of incorrect, in fact, opposite, terminology is not only disingenuous but also dangerous, both to children and to the country as a whole. The Bible warns that will happen in the latter days. We don’t know when those will be, but why not stop it now.
And the consequences for those who speak out for truth have been dire. See what happened to swimmer Riley Gaines at San Francisco State University only a couple of weeks ago. She was chased by a mob basically for saying that God made men and women different and distinct.
We must get back to living by common sense rules. Good is good, and bad is bad. Men are male, and women are female. Only a woman can be pregnant. And perhaps most of all, kids are kids, and in need of protection. There also was and is a special place in His heart for children. And He was quite direct about what happens to those who lead little children astray.
At the same time we must teach children to love others, to not think they are superior to anyone else. Everyone is made in the image of the Creator God whether or not they – or their circumstances – have exchanged that image for a lie, as the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1. Nonetheless of our sins, mistakes, or how we have been tricked by others or by that liar in hell, Jesus died for the sins of all, mine included. In John’s gospel, Jesus said that “truth shall set us free.”
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