What is America Teaching her Sons?

Most Americans do not worry much about their sons. As long as they stay out of jail and leave home before they become too much of a financial burden, American sons are normally given a free pass to do pretty much as they please.

Last night I saw a few minutes of HGTV’s Selling LA, a show featuring multimillion dollar residences in the Los Angeles area and the people who purchase them. The real estate agent was concerned with finding pricey bachelor pads that that will appeal to wealthy young men who want “party houses” where they can entertain when they are in town.

The real estate agent commented that these young men have no interest in marrying; their lives revolve around partying and everything that goes with it. One young man confirmed her assessment by saying that he wanted a balcony with a view so spectacular that when he took a woman to that balcony, he would not need to talk to her. The view would seduce her.  Using this as her criteria, the agent set off in pursuit of the ideal pad.

Finding those bachelor pads was not difficult for the agent. She has ties to a builder who produces nothing else. The properties he featured on last night’s episode range in price from 2.9 million to 6.9 million dollars and are totally unsuitable for families. It is a hard to believe that these types of residences are so much in demand that the builder is actually mass producing them, and he is not worried that he will not find customers to purchase them.

I shook my head and thought, “How sad.” I guess the shaking cleared my head more than I had anticipated because, at that point, I realized that this mindset is not restricted to wealthy young men (or more correctly, young men with wealthy parents).  America’s sons have embraced the notion that partying and seducing women are the only pursuits of any importance.

Among the middle class and the poor the pursuit of alcohol, drugs and sex is no less than it is among the rich. Anyone who has taught in a college or university knows that most of the students are much more concerned with partying than they are with academics. Likewise, young men in the workplace cannot wait for Friday so that they can begin their weekend binges of debauchery. I submit that this is what is wrong with American society.

We used to have a “double standard” that conceded that women should be held to a higher moral standard than men. The thinking was that women should not have sex before marriage and that after marriage they should remain faithful to their husbands. On the other hand, men were “different” and could not be expected to remain pure before marriage or faithful afterwards.

Many people, including me, did not agree with the double standard. However, those of us who did not agree, could not agree about what we did not agree with. I always asserted that men can and should adhere to the same moral standards as women and that both should derive those standards from the teachings of the Bible. Most people, however, believed that men should continue to exercise immorality both before and after marriage and that women should follow suit.

In that argument I lost; they won, and the result has been disastrous. Our society is now filled with single moms who can barely provide for their children and, consequently, spend a great deal of time looking for a man who will move in with them and pay some of the bills. This search takes them night after night into the clubs where they can find single men. The children are neglected, but they do learn early on that partying is the most important thing in life.

America is never going to heal until we return to Biblical principles. When sex is saved for marriage, young men do want to get married. They marry young and concentrate on careers because they have wives and children for whom they are responsible. They are content to live in a more modest house because their priority is a yard where the kids can play and they can set up a barbecue grill.

When extra-marital sex is not an option, people tend to stay married because they never have that affair that is so often instrumental in breaking up a family. Instead of concentrating on illicit lovers, married couples concentrate on their spouses and try to find ways to make them happy.

America must teach her sons that God has never accepted a double standard. He expects purity and faithfulness from both men and women. Until we have men who are willing to live by God’s laws and provide an example to others, our nation will not be healed. We had better start teaching our sons that God’s rules are, in the end, the only ones worth embracing.

For books and updates by Joyce Swann, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net or like her facebook page at http://facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup