Thread by @DennyBurk

Two really sad items caught my attention today. The first one is this op-ed in the @dallasnews about a 6th grade girl traumatized by her classmates' watching "rape porn."

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dallasnews.com/opinion/commen…

@dallasnews The article is difficult to read. Contemplating the implications is even more difficult. This is one mother reporting on a single event in one little girl's life. The one story is horrific to contemplate.

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@dallasnews But think about how many millions of times stories like this are unfolding everyday in the lives of children across this country. Think about children growing up in this environment of ubiquitous pornography.

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@dallasnews Pornography has been a ubiquitous fixture in the lives of millions of children for the better part of a decade. They don't even have to go looking for it. It will find them in the form of friends with smart phones. Two dates are important to remember in this discussion.

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@dallasnews In 2007, broadband internet reaches over 50% of American households. In 2013, smartphone ownership exceeds 50% of the population.

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@dallasnews That means that at some point around 2007, more Americans than not had access not simply to still images but to free video images of people engaged in sex acts. By 2013, more Americans than not had access to video porn at any time and at any place through their smartphone.

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@dallasnews The average age that a young man first encounters pornography is 11-13 years old. That means that countless young men have spent the better part of the last decade with access to moving porn.

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@dallasnews For many of them, everything they have learned about sex has come from pornography. Their view of women and their sexual preferences have been shaped by this poison.

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@dallasnews I am not being hyperbolic when I call porn use a civilizational calamity. The sexual revolution promised us more sex and more pleasure. It has actually delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure.

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@dallasnews It has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life.

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@dallasnews It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting.

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@dallasnews This means that it has given us a generation of young men completely unprepared for marriage and for fatherhood. If you don't have marriage and fatherhood, then you don't have a civilization any longer.

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@dallasnews We have sown to the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind—especially our daughters, who are less likely than ever to find a man who hasn’t been corrupted at least in some measure by this.

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@dallasnews As a Christian and as a pastor, I feel the weight of all of this. I know that porn use is the pastoral challenge that defines our generation. This brokenness is all around us and among us.

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@dallasnews It is the burden of far too many of the men sitting in our pews. I don’t know of any other problem that has done more to subvert manhood and marriage than porn use. It is killing us.

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@dallasnews The only way to counter this darkness is with the light of truth. We were not made for sexual immorality. We were made for God. And what so many people are seeking in the illicit sexual pleasure of porn can never be found there.

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@dallasnews No matter how deep you go into the rabbit hole of porn, you aren’t going to find “it.” You will just become a shell of what God made you to be. By pursuing darkness, you become darkness.

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@dallasnews The only way out of this is to realize that God made us and our sexuality for a purpose. God made us for Himself—to know Him and to be known by Him.

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@dallasnews He wants us to see that the only way to think correctly about pornography is within the moral universe that He Himself has created. The enslaving power of this great evil can only finally and definitively be broken through the power of the gospel.

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@dallasnews Parents, there are some implications for you in all of this. You have to stand in the gap for your children. If you are giving them unfettered access to the internet through smartphones or other devices, you have provided them means to destroy themselves over time.

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@dallasnews You've also provided them the means by which they might corrupt others. If you are going to love your children well and fight for them, you have to stand between them and the cesspool in their pocket--even if it means taking it away.

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@dallasnews If you haven't yet given your child a smartphone, let me suggest that you hold out as long as you can. It will be worth it.

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@dallasnews Your children might treat you like you're the cruelest parent on the planet for taking radical measures, but you know better, don't you? You must see the bigger picture even if they can't. And you must lead them from a place of wisdom and love.

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