Pepsi Promotes Perversion - Buy Generic!

Pepsi is an in-your-face (literally) promoter of the sodomite lifestyle. The company has two TV ads out now that promote same-sex hookups. Both start by playing on the natural attraction between attractive men and women and end in the punch-line of men lusting for men. Oh, it's low key for now -- no kiss, not even physical contact. But it's using sex (gay sex) to sell a product.

Ah well, Madison Avenue has done that for years with the gorgeous model sprawled on the hood of the car or a bikini clad beach bunny drinking a particular soft drink while a handsome guy slathers on the right suntan lotion. Levis actually had two versions of an ad for jeans awhile back -- one with a same-sex couple and the other with a normal couple. (I use the word normal very deliberately. Perversion will never be normal no matter how many people buy the lie.)

Lent calls us to repent from sin and return to the Lord. Lust, no matter how it shows its ugly face is lust, one of the seven deadly sins. It's endemic to our culture (along with greed). The devil will gladly rope in the adulterer, the fornicator, the sodomite, the stripper, and those committing sins of impurity in all its forms.

The devil is devious. He takes what makes us most like God - our power to co-create with Him a new human life, and perverts it. In the garden he told Eve, "If you eat the apple you'll be like God." Today he tells us "If you worship pleasure, you'll find heaven on earth." It was a lie then; it's a lie now, but many are taken in by it... and create their own hell on earth. Ask someone dying of AIDS or a suffering post-aborted woman who says, "I regret my abortion" whether her "choice" brought happiness.

Classic literature is filled with the tragic outcome of lust. Read Anna Karenina, Kristin Lavransdatter, Troilus and Cressida, The Scarlet Letter, and scores of others. Lust always wears glimmering garments, but underneath is corruption.

Lent is a time to achieve true freedom from sin. Mary Magdalene, the harlot, becomes a saint. Hawthorne's fictional Hester Prynne is transformed. Every day is new in the Lord's time and he promises to remember our sins no more -- but only if we repent. So "if today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts."

Spend some time this Lent refelcting on the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The first meditation could well begin with the words of the priest as he applies ashes. "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou must return."

And drink water -- not Pepsi.