The Three Driving Forces of Left-Leaning Culture
I read a news summary this afternoon on the agenda of the left. It matters not where you turn—school, church, or politics they are singing the same song. Go abortion! Go gun control! Go genderism. And yet these issues are already settled.
- Gun control—The Constitution has it covered. The individual is guaranteed to right to bear arms.
- Abortion—Science and theology both demonstrate the sanctity of life.
- Genderism—Nature demonstrates a binary reality.
Considering the Logic of Each One
- Gun control is their perceived cure for violence rained upon one and many with a gun. Yet, there are violent killings with cars, knives, and this past weekend, with a boat. So, why not knives, cars, and boat control from the owner back to GM, Ford, or the boat manufacturer. One big reason is every person on the left desires one or more of these commodities whenever they choose.
The fact is that neither guns nor any of these commodities commit violence! People commit violence. There are several explanations for people committing violence. However, the most obvious one that no one wants to address is parenting. Children are not being parented. They are birthed and, in some communities, have access to education and materialism, and children conclude “I deserve,” but parenting is absent. Others are not so fortunate, live in poverty, never learn how to work, and depend on their peers for ” family.” Parents (if they were ever married) depart or divorce (also prevalent in the previous group), leaving children to raise themselves without models for developing into responsible citizens.
What do I mean by parenting? I define parenting as: being present in the life of the child, being a trainer of the child, being a disciplinarian to the child, being a conversationalist with the child, being a teacher of the child, being a coach of the child, being a role model for the child, being a spiritual guide for the child, gathering like a mother hen the children for family development within family protection. Well, you get the idea.
Sometime in the past few years, my wife and I had dinner at a Landry’s restaurant. Directly across from us was a family of four, including two teenagers. The family walked in with their nose in their phones (all four). They looked up long enough to order, then returned to their phones. They finished their meal and left with their nose in their phones. It took all the restraint I could muster to not walk over to their table and say, “Folks, I spend my life counseling hurting people. Please put those phones away and talk to each other before another counselor, or I must help you rescue your family from despair.”
- Abortion, convenient birth control for those who have chosen to ignore the moral standards once widely accepted in American culture, has reached sixty million since Roe v Wade. Yet both science (Look at an ultrasound. Most practitioners wait until at least six weeks to perform the first pregnancy ultrasound and listen to a fetal heartbeat can be detected at 5 to 6 weeks) and theology witness to the living person. But the left ignores both and promotes this form of birth control.
In my world, counseling, whether secular or sacred, we see the aftermath of this birth control. Sometimes, in the immediate, sometimes early in a marriage, and sometimes years later.
- Genderism is a fascinating puzzle. Until sometime between 1950 and today, the idea of a non-binary understanding has never been proposed—at least not to my knowledge. Yet today, I am told there are as many as fifty genders. This new “reality” appears to be the product of specific dimensions of modern psychology and is determined by choice the of the individual who identifies its gender [interestingly, my assistant, Grammarly, keeps correcting “it or its” with him or her, their or them). Hence, a high school student born a male may identify as a female and be admitted to the girl’s locker room. The question that begs to be asked is how does this advance the left-leaning agenda? If you look at the school board fights, the locker room sexual misconduct, or the office manager using the appropriate pronoun, one might conclude that the value for the left is the creation of chaos in society.
The Question of Navigation
How does one navigate this terrain of social and political minefields? Sociologically the manual is yet to be written. Why is it that the transgender person is to be respected, but the individual who recoils at this sociological dilemma is to be ridiculed as a neanderthal? Another question to consider is this. Is there room in the leftist-leaning agenda for Christianity or any religion? One more observation for my leftist-leaning fellow Americans is this. How do you monitor your agenda so that our constitution does not become a document of extremes, either chaotic libertarianism or totalitarianism?
Again, to borrow the tag line of Dr. Steve Brown of Key Life, “Now You Think About That!”