Schools for Immorality

Where in the world do young people (and their parents) learn this kind of behavior? Of course, they learn it from one another. They are also open to suggestions from outside. In 1980 only 4.6 percent of the movies shown in the United States were rated G, that is, fit for young people to view unaccompanied by an adult. Because of their explicit immorality or violence, more than 55 percent were rated either R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by an adult) or X (persons 17 or under absolutely prohibited).

Would it be better to leave the children at home watching television? By the time he is 15, the average TV-watching youngster has witnessed 13,400 people meet a violent death on the video screen. And now, with more cable TV available, youngsters at home can watch pornography.

In some cocktail bars in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, entertainment includes not only topless waitresses and bottomless dancers but nude performers who climax their act with live sex on the stage. Paying customers are in some cases invited to take part.

If more ideas are wanted, there are drugstore paperbacks galore, suggesting all kinds of sexual experiments. Some books include such misinformation as the following: “You have the good luck to be having a sex life when medical science is able to knock out venereal disease in rapid order. . . . Run to your gynecologist and get fixed up.”

A Teenage Pregnancy Epidemic

Premarital sex was viewed as wrong by 77 percent of Americans in 1969; ten years later only 41 percent felt the same way. In Sweden during the 1950’s and 1960’s, every third bride was pregnant at the altar. By 1978 every third child was born out of wedlock and every ninth couple was living together without marriage.

In 1976 the U.S. Public Health Department estimated that 41 percent of unmarried American girls 17 and under had had sexual intercourse. This represented a 54-percent increase in five years. Not surprisingly, the proportion of girls aged 15 to 19 who had illegitimate children increased a huge 800 percent between 1940 and 1980.

Clearly, sexual morality is no longer valued by most young people. Sexual immorality is viewed as the norm. “I don’t want my boyfriend to know I am a virgin,” one embarrassed 17-year-old high school junior wrote to advice columnist Ann Landers. In answering another letter, the columnist said: “It is useless to tell an 18-year-old girl who has had two abortions that the word ‘no’ is the surest form of birth control.”