U How do we help our boys and girls embrace their God-given gender? Believe it or not, it doesn't start with talking about gender, but with early bonds with parents and peers. Join us for the next Identity Project webinar on June 17th at 7 p.m. Eastern Time to learn more. We'll be joined by clinical psychologist Dr.
Andrew Sodergren, who will show us how family and peer relationships shape our children's understanding of their identity and gender. We'll also learn how parents, pastors, and professionals can compassionately care for kids who are gender-confused. Again, the webinar is Tuesday, June 17th at 7 p.m. Eastern. You can register for free today at colsoncenter.org/slash identity.
That's colsoncenter.org slash identity. Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. In a recent editorial in the New York Times entitled The Delusion of Porn's Harmlessness, Christine Emba challenged the dogma that suggests that anything goes in the bedroom as long as everyone consents. Emba is the author of the book Rethinking Sex, and she goes on to slam the feminist left for being unable to admit that pornography has been terrible for society.
and promotes the objectification and violence against women. And all that happens, in fact, even when everyone involved technically consents. And yet many feminists and progressives still indulge this fantasy that porn can be made and imbibed ethically. And but thinks that's because they're deeply afraid of sounding like religious killjoys. And I quote, Criticizing porn goes against the norm of non-judgmentalism for people who like to consider themselves forward-thinking, thoughtful, open-minded.
There's a dread of seeming prudish, boring, uncool. Most recently, the only people who seem willing to openly criticize the widespread availability of pornography tend to be right-leaning or religious, and so are instantly discounted, often by being disparaged as such. But cracks are beginning to appear in the wall.
Well, Emba's critique of the sexual revolution is certainly one of those cracks. Because she writes for a secular, left-leaning audience, her work has been a necessary challenge to our cultural delusions, including this myth that quote-unquote porn can be harmless. In fact, there's now a growing chorus of mainstream non-religious voices like Nicholas Christoph and Louise Perry, who are arguing that much of what was once called sexual liberation just victimized the vulnerable and degraded our society. These voices are welcome, and their critiques are right as far as they go.
However, they still aren't willing to go far enough. Even the harshest critics of porn and so called sexual freedom seem unable or unwilling to say that sex belongs exclusively within marriage, and that honoring this divinely blessed union is the one and the only healthy sexual ethic. In her book, Emba proposed that partners should refuse to objectify each other and instead just will the good of the other, drawing even on Thomas Aquinas' definition of love. But Aquinas, of course, believed that monogamous marriage is exclusively where that kind of love can happen. As my breakpoint this week, co-host Maria Baer observed in her review of Emba's book, quote, before we can will the good of another, we'll have to know what good means.
We don't need a new sexual ethic. We need to recover a really old one. And that kind of recovery will require not only a clear and stable definition of good, it will also require a brand new definition of. freedom. After all, the rallying cry that brought us this infinitely accessible and increasingly dangerous pornography, the hookup culture, rampant unwed births, the spread of STDs, the normalization of divorce and abortion, and Harvey Weinstein, and not to mention a generation burned out from all of this?
was the promise of sexual freedom. Specifically, it was a cry that reduced freedom to only freedom from. Freedom from rules, responsibilities, and constraints. It was never a call to freedom for, freedom for our purpose or anyone's good. And that's a deeply impoverished view of what freedom is, one that dismisses the most important questions about sex.
What is it for? What are our bodies for? What are we for? Instead, we were told that the only answers to such questions is to do or be whatever I want. But that kind of freedom has proven to be profoundly dehumanizing and enslaving.
And it's left uncountable victims. Christians should never be embarrassed to speak to what's true about human nature or God's design for us. And we absolutely should stop listening to the many voices, especially the ones claiming to be Christian, who tell us that we're too obsessed with sex and should just focus on social justice issues instead. Even secular writers now are recognizing. that justice and sexual ethics are deeply connected in today's world.
and rooted in our culture's lies. about sexual freedom. No, we have every reason to be confident in our really old sexual ethics. After all, the Bible was so far ahead of the curve on all this. And the revolution was just wrong.
the only sexual ethic capable of protecting and enhancing the good of all involved Is the covenantal view of marriage. In other words, we don't need an adjustment to our culture's idea of sexual freedom, we need to be liberated. from it. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Shane Morris.
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