Teach Your Children about True Love and the Way to Preserve It!

While looking for information about Call to Action yesterday, I happened to come across this old article from a back issue of the Les Femmes newsletter. With college recently starting and young people going off into the dens of iniquity that our college campuses have become, I thought this Mom's Letter to Her Son was worth another look.

Parents, love your children enough to tell them the plain truth!

A Mother's Letter to Her Son at College

Rebel Against the Culture: Value Virginity

We've reached a point in moral degradation where the only counter-cultural rebellion is to practice moral virtue. Nowhere is this more true than in sexual relationships. Women these days are, to many men (little boys really), nothing more than a board with a hole in it....or is that "broad." The term "hook-up" says it all where, on the morning after, one may not even remember the name or sex (in modern parlance "gender") or number of last night's "partners." Sadly, virginity has become a virtue of ridicule.

Yes, in the brave new world of sexual orgy, there's only way to rebel. Stay a virgin until marriage. Respect all the people you meet enough to focus on getting to know them intimately without touching. The "meeting of minds" is the beginning of true love, whether it's eros (sexual love) or filial (friendship) or the highest love, agape (love between God and man). We can only truly love the other who is known intimately. The lover who is not first a friend of the mind and heart is unlikely to be the true love.

The only way that true intimacy comes about is for minds and spirits, not bodies, to communicate intimately. Deep friendships are possible without sex and, in fact, sex can get in the way of developing deep friendships. When that happens sex becomes a danger because it can fool a person into establishing a permanent relationship, i.e., marriage (well, it used to be permanent) to the wrong person. The false intimacy of sex without true love goes a long way toward explaining the reluctance of young couples to marry and the breakdown of so many marriages after a short time. I know of too many marriages that don't last as long as the wedding planning. What does that say about the quality of those relationships?

Virginity protected by modesty is the greatest insurance against marital unhappiness. The idea that one can try marriage out by shacking up is an illusion borne out by the higher divorce rate among those who cohabit. So all you teenage rebels out there, fight against the prevailing culture by embracing virginity. It not only offers the best promise of marital happiness later, but it preserves you from sexually transmitted diseases and premarital pregnancy with its consequent temptation to abortion. Nothing illustrates the false love of fornication and adultery more than the eagerness to murder the "love" child conceived as a result of it.

True love - or lust and contraception: It's your choice.

Since the 1960s we've been in a sexual revolution launched by a wide range of artificial hormones generically described as "the pill." In recent years the drugs have also been delivered via hormone-filled tubes inserted in a woman's upper arm (NORPLANT) or a patch worn underneath her clothing.

What most women don't know is how dangerous these drugs are, particularly the birth control patch which delivers about 60% more estrogen than the pill. Hundreds of women have developed deep vein thrombosis (blood clots) in the legs or pulmonary embolisms (blood clost in the lungs). At least twenty women have died. This is consistent with the experience of the early high-dosage pill which also caused death in women leading to the development of lower-dose alternatives.

Johnson and Johnson, maker of the Ortho Evra birth control patch has settled hundreds of cases to the tune of $68 million in payouts. Unfortunately, most of those have been out-of-court settlments with confidentiality invoked letting the company continue to pretend the drugs have minimal risk.

The world continues to ignore or ridicule Humanae Vitae as the facts upholding its warnings mount. No one who follows Church teaching against the use of contraception will ever suffer like the 25-year-old assistant Volleyball Coach at the University of Cincinnatti, Stefanie Rosenfeld. She died of a heart attack less than a month after starting the patch. And there are dozens of other young women like her, some only teenagers, victims of a culture that encourages uncommitted copulation rather than the true spiritual intimacy and conjugal love of marriage and child-bearing.

Women are the big losers because they bear the most damage from the sexual revolution: physical damage to their bodies, but equally devastating spiritual damage to their souls. Women are naturally inclined toward love and nurturing. A man can more easily separate his sex drive from his soul-center. But for women, it can be shattering. If she gives herself out of a mistaken notion of love, the betrayal is deep and long-lasting. Is that not, perhaps, one explanation for the growing number of lesbians among us?

We need a return to the beautiful virtue of chastity. It's a manly virtue that requires courageous self-control on the part of young men who need to guard their eyes from a continuous barrage of lustful images thrown at them by the culture. It is also a womanly virtue wrapped in modesty that guards and protects true love. Pray the young and remind them that:

True love waits. Pass it on.