September 3, 2007
Jane Jimenez
The 60s sexual revolution was in full bloom as I headed to college in 1969. Founded on a new definition of happiness…the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow…the revolution spawned a new vocabulary.
Words birthed in the sexual revolution…liberation, freedom, self-expression, empowerment…all of these defined the supposed rewards of releasing strictures and limits of a more “primitive world” imposed on human behavior. We demanded a better happiness. Anything goes. If it feels good, do it. No limits. No fear.
A new kind of happiness at the end of the rainbow thus demanded a new road to happiness. Planning families gave way to preventing families. Babies were prevented by pills instead of self-control, and when both self-control and pills failed, babies were redefined as tissues and cells to be removed or eliminated.
Social institutions and cultural pace-setters became vested in affirming this new road to happiness. Professors wrote new textbooks based on an untested social hypothesis, and they began indoctrinating a generation to believe that science would eventually document the success of re-engineering creation.
Capitalizing on the profits to be made in promoting the proposition that unrestrained human behavior leads to self-fulfillment, marketing campaigns put the mantra to snappy jingles, do it my way for the me generation.
Man as the creator…recreating ourselves in the image of the happiness we thought we most wanted. We have finally succeeded in elevating our selfish interests to the pinnacle of noble achievement.
Now all that remains to complete this brave new world is removing the vestiges of antiquated notions of family from our laws and social government. California is prepared to lead the way. In legal briefs filed with the California Supreme Court by the California Governor and Attorney General, marriage between a man and a woman has been reduced to an inconsequential notion without any social merit to motivate governmental support.
This is an odd time to dismantle marriage as mankind has known it…just at the time when social research has given expression to the powerfully positive effects of raising children in a stable marriage between mother and father. Even as we have insisted for forty years on our rights to construct a new happiness, research leads back to the world we are running from.
Social research clearly shows the benefits of traditional family structure on building self-esteem for children, leading to their success in school and reducing the negatives for them of crime, drugs, alcohol and risky behaviors. Children in modern research studies are giving powerful witness to the pain and harm of divorce. Listening to them…what is the impact on our children of recreating the world for ourselves? We have “won” at their expense.
The breakup of families is no easy path to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Neither is the destruction of life required by campaigns to prevent families. Courageous voices of women who bought into the sexual revolution are being heard, a testimony to the failure of pills and medical procedures to produce the promised happiness.
Families, marriage and children…these were not accidents of an antiquated creation we could dispose of without consequence. They were the products of truth, the truth of human existence created long before we were the twinkle in our parents’ eyes.
Truth exists for us to know. We must learn truth, not create it. Truth doesn’t come and go, changing hither and thither, based on our own whims. Truth was created in the beginning…without our input. It forms the foundation for our human nature and happiness.
Lust and covetousness were more than sins. They defined boundaries set on human willfulness and rebellion, limiting our selfishness in wanting more of the world than we were entitled to.
If truth be known, happiness was always there for us to have. We just ignored the road signs and charted our own path away from the end of the rainbow.