Sex Without Marriage Is Exploitive

Sexual intercourse outside of marriage is nearly always exploitative, though, undoubtedly, there are couples who demonstrate mutual fidelity without legal sanction.  Our society provides for common-law marriage; we recognize that a couple can make a genuine commitment without benefit of the usual legal arrangement.  There will always be exceptional instances where two people achieve union first and then seek public or official acknowledgement of their oneness.  But having said this, we must go on to say that most premarital intercourse does not result in marriage.  In the vast majority of cases, when it is not previously undergirded with the commitment of marriage, sexual intercourse simply means that one person is taking from another.  Usually premarital intimacy is giving of one’s body without giving of one’s self.  Whenever two persons make use of each other’s bodies, while they remain unwilling or unable to surrender their selves at the same level, it is exploitation.  Often, when two people allow themselves to be swept into an illicit liaison, it is not because they love each other too much, but because they respect each other too little.

Genuine love demands that a couple preserve the final line of intimacy until the final commitment of marriage….

William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World, p.84-85

Fake "Rights"

“Rights,” as the term is used ideologically, are ultimately assertions of arbitrary authority by third parties to prescribe things that others have never agreed to.

The same principle is expressed when terms like “social responsibility” or “social contract” are used to describe what third parties want done, regardless of whether any others have agreed to do it.  Thus business is said to have a “social responsibility” to provide various benefits to various individuals or to society at large, regardless of whether or not those businesses have chosen to assume such a responsibility.  Nor are these responsibilities necessarily based on laws that have been enacted.  On the contrary, the asserted “responsibilities” are the basis for advocating the passing of such laws, even though the responsibilities have no basis themselves, other than the fact that third parties want them imposed.

The same principle can be seen in assertions of figurative “promises,” as in the title of “The Promise of American Life,” by Herbert Croly, the Progressive-era first editor of the “New Republic’” magazine.  These “promises” are found nowhere except in the desires of Herbert Croly and like-minded Progressives, including some a hundred years later.  Similarly with “contracts” that no one has signed or even seen.  Thus Social Security has been described as a “contract between generations” when, obviously, generations yet unborn could not have agreed to any such contract.

Legal obligations can of course be imposed on unborn generations, whether through Social Security or the national debt, but the argument is not about what is physically possible but what has any logical or empirical foundation.  To say that it has a moral foundation, without providing any specifics, is only to say that some people feel that way.  But there would be no issue in the first place unless other people felt differently.  Nor are the asserted “rights,” “social responsibilities,” or fictitious “contracts” or “promises” necessarily based on claims of demonstrable majorities favoring such things.  On the contrary, they are asserted as reasons why the majority or political leaders or the courts ought to impose what third parties want imposed.  They are arguments without arguments.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.158

Is Sex Merely a Function?

If human sexuality were merely a matter of physiological function, and not expressive of man’s unique nature, then the ability to perform the function would be the sole criterion, and sexual partners might be interchangeable at will — if one’s partner is merely a functionary, one functionary is as good as another.

William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World,  p.82-83

Race-Baiters

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.  Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.  There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get will.


Booker T. Washington.  Cited by Taleeb Starkes, The Un-Civil War:  Blacks vs Niggers, p.222-223

A True Warrior

Here’s what a warrior is.  It’s not the guy who is armed with an AR15 and 30-round magazines.  The warrior is someone who says: “This is what I love.  This is what I hold dear.  This is my family.  This is my country.  This is my faith.  And this is what threatens it.  This is the enemy.  You will not hurt what I hold dear.  You will not hurt what I love, without coming through me.”

General Jerry Boykin, “God’s Call to Warriors.”  Decision magazine April 2014, p.26

Rights and Obligations

If someone has a right, someone else has an obligation.  But the proposed right to a “living wage,” for example, is not based on any obligation agreed to by an employer.  On the contrary, this “right” is cited as a reason why government should force the employer to pay what third parties would like to be paid.

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.157 

Who Do You Associate With?

Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.


Booker T. Washington.  Cited by Taleeb Starkes in, "The Un-Civil War: Blacks vs Niggers," p.243

A Bad Ideology About Sex

The words of the famous creed are: “Anything in sex is OK as long as no one gets hurt.”  This proviso seems adequate to many otherwise thoughtful people, because they do not examine carefully the meaning of “hurt.”  Given our human finitude, we do not always know who is hurt, for life is such an intricate maze that acts which seem trivial at the moment may bring injury years later.  The consequences of human conduct are so far-reaching that no moral decision is even an isolated one.  There are many ways in which one can be hurt, in addition to obvious physical ones.


William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World, p.81

Hollywood's Agenda

We’ve always heard that Hollywood is about making money, but I think it’s really about an immoral or amoral agenda to promote lifestyles, relativism, compromise and shades of gray with no black and white. …

There is a force in that community that says more important than making $100 million is to plant seeds in the minds of young people that will take them away from Jude-Christian ethics. …

Like anything, if you’re exposed to it enough, you become numb to it and you don’t see its effects on you.  I tell the folks at our church it’s like eating cheesecake.  We wake up and can’t feel its effects.  But if we ate it and woke up with a big lump of fat that had appeared on our side, we’d say, “Whoa, that’s not good.”

It’s the cumulative effect that wears down our resistance.  The devil is willing to bide his time and wait for the end result.  Scripture tells us to resist the devil and he will flee from us (James 4:7) — but first it says to submit ourselves to God.

Michael Catt, senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, GA.  Cited by Charles Chandler, “Hollywood’s Immoral Agenda,” Decision magazine April 2014, p18, 20

Liberal's Are Poor Philanthropists

An empirical study by Professor Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University, to test the extent to which liberals and conservatives in American donated money, blood, and time to philanthropic endeavors, found that conservatives donated on average both a larger amount of money and a higher percentage of their incomes (which were slightly lower than liberals’ incomes) to philanthropic causes, that they donated more hours of their time as volunteers, and that they donated far more blood.


Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.145

Morality and Liberals

Modern liberalism tends to classify all moral distinctions it does not accept as hateful and invalid.


Robert H. Bork, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," p.113

Think About Who Is Invited Into Your Home

Let's face it, television is an invention where you're entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your house!


Michael Landon, stated at a "Dean Martin Roast."  Cited by Franklin Graham, "Hollywood: Entertaining Ourselves To Death?" Decision magazine, April 2014, p.4

Addiction Is NOT a Disease

[N]o studies -- including those searching for an "addiction gene" -- have proved that a factor other than the self is responsible for the individual's choice to abuse drugs or alcohol.  Despite the consistency of this data, however, there is a constant demand for more addiction treatment.  The public is rarely told just how utterly ineffective most of these treatment programs really are -- especially those that stress the model of addiction-as-disease instead of personal responsibility.


Anne Hendershott, "The Politics of Deviance," p.27

Materialism Sees Sex As Just a Function

All materialistic philosophies regard sex as a function and view marriage as merely instrumental.  Societies that have reflected this view always favor easy divorce, when one of the partners is found to be incapable of performing the procreative function.  Our own culture, which is decisively materialistic in practice, holds that partners  should not be bound when they decide that they are incompatible — a weasel word, which often means one partner does not perform the physical function to the full satisfaction of the other.  Such a view of marriage does not regard the husband and wife as bound together in a relationship of being, but as involved in a functional liaison.

William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World,  p.80

Removing Titles Does Not Make You More "Equal"

Equality is one of the most widespread and long-lived ideals, especially among modern intellectuals.*

*This sometimes extends to avoidance of titles that distinguish either varying achievements or the varying personal relationships among individuals. Calling a stranger named William Smith “Bill”  — instead of Mr. Smith, Dr. Smith, Colonel Smith or whatever his title might be — is just one of these increasingly common practices which verbally banish differences.  This can extend to children calling adults, including their teachers or even parents, by their first names.  But a mother is not just another woman named Mary or Elizabeth.  Her relationship to the child is one unlike any other that the child is likely to encounter in a lifetime.  Moreover, a given individual will have many different names, denoting widely varying relationships with others.  William Smith, for example, may be Uncle Bill to his siblings’ children, “Billy” as a small child, “honey” to his wife, “coach” to a Little League team and so on.  These are often relationships that people on both ends of a relationship may need to keep in mind, in order to remind themselves that they are not just abstract people in an abstract world but people with limited roles or particular responsibilities vis-a-vis particular others.


Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.133

"Baby Busters" Philosophy Is Ruining Our Culture

It is said that baby busters do not want to be lectured; they expect to be entertained.  They prefer videos to books; many of them have not learned to think in a linear fashion; they put more store that they recognize in mere impressions.  As a result, they can live with all sorts of logical inconsistencies and be totally unaware of them.  (How many times have I tried to explain to a university-age young person who has made some profession of faith that it is fundamentally inconsistent to claim to know and love the God of the Bible, while cohabiting with someone?  They can see they are doing what the Bible forbids, but when you press them to articulate the contradiction they scuttle into inconsistency without embarrassment.)  They are cynical, not idealistic.  They vehemently deny the existence of absolutes: that is their one absolute.  Many have never experienced principled morality in the home.  They have been brought up without a coherent vision or value system, and they have embraced pragmatism with a vengeance.  Many of them are furious with the preceding generation (that’s me and my generation) for being so crassly materialistic as to ruin the economy and dump a tax load onto their shoulders.  On the other hand, they are no less materialistic themselves, and will vote for any candidate who promises to deliver more goodies while lowering taxes - precisely the same greedy stupidity that afflicted the generation they condemn.  Pluralism is so much their creed that even when the strongest arguments are arrayed to explain, on biblical presuppositions, why morally “good” people should be rejected by the Christian God and assigned to hell, their emotions so rule their heads that very frequently no amount of argumentation is adequate.  On the other hand, they tend to be interested in “spirituality” (very hazily defined), and on the whole tend to see themselves as occupying a fairly high place in the spiritual pecking order.


D.A. Carson, “The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism,” p. 45

The Effects of Liberalism

What liberalism has constantly moved away from are the constraints on personal liberty imposed by religion, morality, law, family, and community.

Robert H. Bork, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," p. 61

Sex Is More Than Just Genitalia

The playboy philosophy perpetuates the synthetic view of man, in which sex is reduced to his genital parts.  The fallacy of such a view is that it makes too little of sex, not too much, for it isolates what was meant to pervade and makes small what was intended to be large.  Thus the popular philosophy falls into the same fallacy as that of the religious heritage it affects to despise.


William S. Banowsky, It’s A Playboy World, p.78-79

Using Pornography Is Adultery

Using pornography is like adultery.  It’s not legally adultery, which requires penetration.  But there are many ways of cheating.  It’s often effectively desertion — men abandoning their family to spend time with porn.

Marcia Maddox, cited by Pamela Paul, "From Pornography to Porno to Porn: How Porn Became the Norm,” p.12

Don't Trip Over the Truth

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Winston Churchill