Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................v
Introduction....................xi
1. Cultural Terrorism....................1
2. Sexualized Everything....................27
3. Manipulating Minds for Money....................45
4. Foundation of Faith....................61
5. Moms and Dads Loving Each Other....................76
6. Parent-Directed Education....................98
7. Civility in an Uncivil World....................119
8. I'm the Mamma! (Or, Be the Daddy!)....................134
9. Help for Moms....................145
10. Help for Dads (and a "Must-Read" for Moms)....................160
11. Learning from Heroes....................181
12. Coaching for Life....................201
13. The Daily Battle....................213
Resources....................228
Read a Sample Chapter
HOME INVASION
PROTECTING YOUR FAMILY IN A CULTURE THAT'S GONE STARK RAVING MAD
By REBECCA HAGELIN NELSON CURRENT
Copyright © 2007 REBECCA HAGELIN
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-59555-007-1
Chapter One
CULTURAL TERRORISM
Super Bowl 2004 has gone down in history as the most talked about Bowl of all time. Not because of the game, mind you. No, it was the halftime show, complete with Janet "Flashing" Jackson, that made it such an unforgettable experience for ninety million Americans-including my daughter and me. It now serves as perhaps the most infamous example of how our culture has gone stark raving mad.
There we were, my precious eleven-year-old and I, curled up on the couch anticipating a fabulous halftime extravaganza. Let's be clear about this: We weren't watching the game-not a single minute of it. Like most women I know, football just isn't my thing. But I'm also somehow connected to this event every year that seems to be the epitome of everything American. Besides, I've always enjoyed the creative commercials and halftime shows. Since all the guys in our family were watching the game elsewhere, I decided to make it a girls' night.
My daughter and I were having a blast running back and forth between decorating her room and trying to catch the much-awaited halftime spectacle. And boy, what a spectacle it was!
Halftime had already started before we realized it, so we quickly scrambled to catch the rest of the show. Big mistake. I should have known better when I saw the cast of shady characters gyrating across the stage to chaotic music and words I couldn't quite understand. But I'm an optimist, so as Kristin and I snuggled close on the couch and threw the blanket over our legs, I just knew-or rather, nervously hoped-the show would get better.
"Besides," I thought, "millions upon millions of families are gathered around their television sets across America to watch the biggest show of the year-we can't all be wrong." At that precise moment, I became a very dumb blonde, relied on groupthink, ignored my inner instinct, and sat uncomfortably glued to the tube along with the rest of America and my trusting, vulnerable little girl.
By the time Justin Timberlake ripped off half of Janet's bra to reveal her bare breast as if she were some cheap lap dancer, it was too late.
But it wasn't just Janet's so-called "wardrobe malfunction" that made me regret tuning in. The crude over-sexualized commercials should have tipped me off that even the Super Bowl is no longer family-friendly. From crotch-grabbing dogs, to a monkey begging a girl for sex, to ads for medications promising to enhance romance, the nation was saturated with Super Bowl sex.
What exactly does any of that have to do with the American pastime of watching the biggest football game of the year? The attraction for so many millions used to be about the awesome display of teamwork, athletic ability, and strategy. It used to be about a competition between the best of the best. But America has been sliding down the slippery sewer of cultural immorality for so long that it was not until we were faced with the show's complete disregard for family values that we realized-ugh, we're covered with stinking sludge.
My friend, David Spady, of Salem Communications, has a much better phrase for what America was exposed to during that memorable Super Bowl Sunday: cultural terrorism. He's right. While American soldiers die overseas to protect our freedom, we're becoming slaves to malevolence in our own homes. While we're subjected to body searches at airports, increased monitoring of communications, and constantly changing terror alerts-all to combat terrorists who would destroy our nation-we unwittingly invite cultural terrorists into our homes under the guise of entertainment and education, and unwittingly allow them to destroy our sensibilities, personal values, and the innocence of our children. The American family is suffering from a home invasion that is robbing our children of their youth and their futures.
Moms, Dads ... it's time to go to battle for our kids. Set the standards higher for your home, your schools, and yourselves. Set limits on everything from video content to television viewing to how your kids should dress-and stick with them. And let your voices be heard loud and clear by advertisers, networks, and others who would pass off moral depravity as family entertainment, "open-minded" learning, and "diversity." And join me in shutting off the smut ... before it's too late.
A STEADY DIET OF GARBAGE
Another telltale sign of America's cultural degradation revealed in 2004 was the collection of now-infamous photos that were circulated around the world documenting the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by a few renegade American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Every decent person I know reacted in horror to the story. When the lewd photos emerged of the "good guys" forcing prisoners to engage in sexual acts, and leading them around on leashes with hoods over their heads, and threatening them with electrocution, people were speechless and horrified.
We were right to be enraged and to demand that those involved be severely punished. And punished they were, including being discharged from the military and receiving prison time. Yes, our soldiers were in the midst of fighting the scum of the earth-terrorists. But the raunchy actions of a few renegade Americans in uniform temporarily caused us to lose the moral high ground in the war against evil. And although America did not forget that the vast majority of our brave soldiers are decent human beings who are willing to sacrifice their very lives to secure freedom for others, the unspeakable actions of a few put our military at great risk and caused our nation to be ridiculed.
Should we have been shocked that some Americans are capable of such barbaric behavior as depicted in the now infamous photos? Is it possible that the American culture aided and abetted this outrage?
Consider:
Pornography is the No. 1 Internet industry-No. 1. According to 2003 statistics from the Internet Filter Review, there are 4.2 million porn Web sites. American consumers spent an estimated $220 million at such fee-based "adult" sites in 2001, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, a New York Internet research firm. That was up from $148 million in 1999. Jupiter is projecting $320 million by 2005. A comprehensive two-year study by Alexa Research, a leading Web intelligence and traffic-measurement service, revealed "sex" was the most popular term for which people searched. According to their online searching habits, people want "sex" more than they want "games," "music," "travel," "jokes," "cars," "jobs," "weather," and "health" combined. A nationwide survey of 1,031 adults conducted by Zogby International and Focus on the Family on March 8-10, 2000, found that "20 percent of respondents-which extrapolates to 40 million adults-admitted visiting a sexually-oriented Web site. According to the Nielsen Net ratings, 17.5 million surfers visited porn sites from their homes in January of 2000-a 40 percent increase compared with September of 1999." According to Time magazine, pornographic images on the Internet increased by 1800 percent in the period from 1998 to the end of 2003. According to a 2001 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, "American media are thought to be the most sexually suggestive in the Western hemisphere. The average American adolescent will view nearly fourteen thousand sexual references per year, yet only 165 of these references deal with birth control, self-control, abstinence, or the risk of pregnancy or STDs." The pediatric report also said that "56 percent of all programs on American television were found to contain sexual content. The so-called 'family hour' of prime time television (8:00 to 9:00 P.M.) contains on average more than eight sexual incidents, which is more than four times what it contained in 1976. Nearly one third of family-hour shows contain sexual references...." According to The Medical Institute, "Several studies analyzing content of music videos showed that sexual intimacy was prevalent in 60-70 percent of them, there was an emphasis on sexual contact without commitment, and that 81 percent of videos that showed violence also showed sexual imagery." A study by the American Psychological Association found that exposure to sexualized violence is harmful, in particular in its effect on male attitudes about sex and intimacy, and causes males to be less sensitive to females. Graphic sex education is rampant in our schools, offering children as young as ten explicit demonstrations of contraceptive use (especially condoms) and direct encouragement to experiment sexually.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The average soldier at the time the horrific events occurred in Abu Ghraib was receiving only three hours of training a year on the Geneva Conventions regarding the proper treatment of prisoners of war. Is it possible to deprogram and reprogram soldiers-who come from a culture living the above-mentioned statistics-in just three hours a year?
What about the rest of Americans-those of us who are not in the military-who receive no formal training in how to treat other human beings who are vulnerable? What is the future of our country when our youth are feeding on a steady diet of garbage?
Amid the noble struggle to establish and maintain a nation of moral integrity, freedom, and faith in God, our history has also included periods punctuated by acts of shame. The horrors of slavery come to mind. Yet, almost alone among nations throughout history, the United States has always managed to hold herself accountable for her ills, take corrective action, and move to a higher level in our treatment of others.
Why? Because Americans once shared a collective understanding that ours is a society based on faith in God and His immutable laws of unconditional love, decency, and the simple but powerful concept of treating others as we would be treated.
Our schools once taught biblical principles. Our families gathered regularly in churches and synagogues. Prayer was a standard part of life-both private and public. Americans were taught the Ten Commandments and the rich Judeo-Christian heritage of our country.
But all that changed in the 1960s when there began to be a steady removal of God and His absolutes from the public square. As a nation we forgot, as President Lincoln once said when he quoted the Bible, "that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Schools were purged of prayer and biblical values, leaving a vacuum that was soon filled with the preaching of moral relativism, sexual anarchy, and a trashing of U.S. history. Now, about forty years later, there is no collective understanding of our Judeo-Christian heritage and the values that once permeated our halls of government, our schools, and our lives.
Our nation once looked to the truth of the book of Proverbs in the Bible: "To receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice and equity; to give prudence to the naïve, to the youth knowledge and discretion." Today, we teach our children to rely on their own wisdom and judgment formed by endless hours of sexualized programming, situational ethics, and group thinking. And we're surprised by the behavior of a few Americans at Abu Ghraib?
With the nonjudgmental, sex-crazed, anything-goes culture that we have become at home, it seems that America has set herself up for international humiliation and a dismal future. Our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13. We permit television and computers to bring all manner of filth into our homes. We permit school children to be taught that any type of sexuality should be viewed as an acceptable lifestyle. We allow Christianity and the teaching of Judeo-Christian values to be scrubbed from the public square. We allow our children to be taught how to use condoms in school, rather than why to avoid sex.
We let these things happen. They don't happen on their own.
It's time to take a cold, hard look at the degradation in our own country-and in our own homes. It's time to start protecting our families.
HOME INVADERS
Television's moral decline in programming and advertising; the rise of DVD players, VCRs, and the fall of ratings standards; and the ease of accessing hardcore pornography on the Internet make these media outlets the most dangerous of home invaders. For many legitimate reasons-entertainment, education, research, etc.-virtually every American parent has installed these easy routes for the enemy to infiltrate our homes. With the touch of a button or the click of the mouse, the vilest of human beings enter our living rooms and our children's bedrooms and engage in behaviors that we would never allow live, warm bodies to do. Yet, there they are-hour after hour, day after day-displaying their violence, graphic sex acts, and foul language in front of our children while good parents hang out in the kitchen and make dinner.
TV programming hasn't been truly safe for kids for at least twenty-five years. Oh, the process has been mostly gradual, of course. But to see how much things have changed, consider the fact that shows like Three's Company, All in the Family, and Soap were once considered very risqué. But today's prime time programming often makes shows filled "only" with sexual innuendo look tame.
The "family hour"-the time slot from about 8:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M., when shows like The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, and Happy Days used to air-is long gone. In its place we have culturally celebrated programs such as Friends, which ran for a decade, or, even more disturbing, Will & Grace. Yes, the writing in both of these shows is often clever and funny, but the normalization of rampant promiscuity and homosexuality is certainly not.
And these are just the most high-profile examples. "Think, for example, not just of the explicit raunchiness of MTV, but of the machine-gun double entendres of virtually every sitcom on television, aired and cabled all day long," Mitchell Pearlstein, president of Center of the American Experiment, noted in an article written as Friends was about to go off the air. "Now think of the near-impossibility of monitoring all of this and of maintaining age-appropriate moats around it."
And our kids are consuming this programming in alarming quantities. According to a 2001 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education, "[B]y the time adolescents graduate from high school, they will have spent fifteen thousand hours watching television, compared with twelve thousand hours spent in the classroom." This extrapolates to some three to four hours a day sitting in front of the tube. Of course, it doesn't help that many teenagers have a TV set in their rooms where they view anything they want, completely unsupervised-some 66 percent, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
And the problem doesn't stop with raunchy programs. There's not an hour in the day that is safe from ads laced with sex or violence. Many a parent who has carefully chosen a good program for the family to watch together must dive repeatedly for the remote control when an ad for, say, an R-rated movie or a sexual enhancement product pops up.
Even an ad that doesn't use suggestive or disturbing imagery or words can still prompt innocence-busting questions: "Mom, what's erectile dysfunction?"
Movie critic and national radio host Michael Medved is well acquainted with the power of visual imagery. As he and his wife, Diane, wrote in their book Saving Childhood, "Clicking on the remote control leaves children's impressionable minds open to any scene an advertiser or director wants to flash on the screen, and open to any belief system that will titillate an audience enough to increase profits."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HOME INVASION by REBECCA HAGELIN Copyright © 2007 by REBECCA HAGELIN. Excerpted by permission.
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