That's Not Freedom

I came across a talk by Sharon Eubank, given in 2014. She has been head of Latter-day Saint Charities since 2011, and since 2017 she has also been serving as a counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. That is the worldwide women’s organization for our Church—in fact, possibly the largest women’s organization in the world, with about 7.1 million women. (Fun fact: Looking up bio information on her, I learned her dad was the weatherman while I was growing up. I remember him being very enthusiastic about upcoming snowstorms.)

Sharon Eubank
screenshot from here

She says,

There’s one thing that I’m going to personally reject, and that is the mistake of labeling promiscuity as, somehow, freedom.

This talk was given to fellow Latter-day Saints, so there is terminology that can be used in a religious setting that may not often be used elsewhere. She refers to a scripture in the Book of Mormon, following Christ’s visit to the people there. The scripture is 4 Nephi 1:16:

And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness. And surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.

I’ll take a moment here to define a couple of terms not often used in our time.

Whoredoms: prostitution (sex in exchange for money), or, more simply, fornication of any sort, which means sex outside the commitment of marriage, including adultery.

Lasciviousness: characterized by expressing lust, lewdness, or wantonness, which means sexually loose or unrestrained.

In my religion, any sex outside of marriage—and any lasciviousness, which would include lustful contact of body parts usually kept covered—is a sin. That used to be the general understanding in the Christian world. But in today’s world, these basic definitions are mostly missing.

Back to Sharon Eubank. Considering that scripture verse led her to ask the question, “What would it be like if there were no whoredoms? What would that society be like?” And she came up with a list:

·       Teenage couples don’t get pregnant and have to get married to the wrong person.

·       Lives don’t get warped and stalled by sexual abuse.

·       There’s no fear of rape or violence.

·       There’s great security on the streets.

·       There’s no serial killers.

·       There’s no kidnappings.

·       There’s no market for prostitutes.

·       There’s no sex trade.

·       There’s no sexual slavery.

·       Spouses don’t have affairs and commit adultery.

·       Marriages stay intact, and children aren’t raised in the insecurity and the divided loyalties of divorce.

·       Cities don’t have seedy, creepy neighborhoods that are filled with adult theaters and deviant bookstores.

·       There’s no appetite for porn, and it doesn’t degrade the people who make it, or who watch it, and it doesn’t warp the sexual development of young people and rot the relationship between a husband and a wife.

·       There are no children being raised by a generation of women and painfully wondering where their fathers are.

·       And all of the energy and the money that goes into those activities above is available for something else.

A society that has no whoredoms has all those benefits. She adds, “How is that not more free and not more desirable? For women, for men, for children? How is that not?”

When you look at the ills in society, and you want a serious way to resolve, eliminate, or at least decrease many of them, having human beings make the conscious decision to limit sex to within marriage is nigh unto a magic cure.

Social science data agrees. We’ve known for a long time the formula for economic relief from poverty in the United States:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

There are more than economic societal goods that come from marriage. A good source is the Witherspoon Institute.  Back in 2006 I got their Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles. In the section “Evidence from the Social Sciences,” it summarizes,

In virtually every known human society, the institution of marriage has served and continues to serve three important public purposes. First, marriage is the institution through which societies seek to organize the bearing and rearing of children; it is particularly important in ensuring that children have the love and support of their father. Second, marriage provides direction, order, and stability to adult sexual unions and to their economic, social, and biological consequences. Third, marriage civilizes men, furnishing them with a sense of purpose, norms, and social status that orient their lives away from vice and toward virtue. Marriage achieves its myriad purposes through both social and biological means that are not easily replicated by the various alternatives to marriage. When marriage is strong, children and adults both tend to flourish; when marriage breaks down, every element of society suffers.

Women particularly are better off when society honors marriage and condemns sex outside of marriage. When you look at the list of societal ills, the reverse of Eubank's list above, you can see that women are more vulnerable to the large majority of them.

What if it could be made clear that the tradeoff to eliminate those societal ills would be chastity before marriage and complete fidelity after marriage? Because, if you’re not willing to make that tradeoff, you’re contributing to those problems.

But people can’t ever live chaste lives, you say? Not true. Scriptures tell us it’s possible. Those people in the Book of Mormon, mentioned above, plus there was an earlier generation, called the people of Ammon, who did it. And, in the Bible, there are the people in the city of Enoch. They all did it completely. Beyond that, every successful civilization in the history of the world has thrived only as long as they honored marriage.

Eubank says,

Yet we live in a world that says it’s not possible; you cannot expect those kinds of things from people. People will not react in those ways. This is just natural; it’s who we are. You can’t make those expectations. And yet our God has said, “I expect these things.”

Meanwhile, I came across a relatively new PragerU video with Lauren Chen, who does a podcast on The Blaze called Pseudo-Intellectual, aimed at millennials.

I’m sharing the 5-minute video in full, below. But I’d like to bring up a few of her points about marriage. She says:

I have no doubt the reason so many women get stuck in dead-end relationships is that it has become taboo—or, to be precise, not politically correct—for a woman to articulate what she really wants.

Which takes me back to marriage, and why women crave it. Here are three reasons:

Protection. Commitment. Love.

Nothing wrong with wanting those things. It is something women have wanted—and great societies have valued—for thousands of years. It is something men still want, too. Little wonder study after study shows that those in good marriages are happier, healthier, even wealthier than those who are not.

She suggests that women would be better off being clear about what they want, and then don’t waste time in a dating relationship that won’t lead to marriage.

While our society has done a lot to convince people that marriage isn’t worthwhile, she says we still all know better:

To someone who tells you that a marriage license is trivial, “just a piece of paper,” here’s a good response: If it’s just a piece of paper, why are you so reluctant to sign it? The answer, of course, is that no one believes that it’s trivial. Everyone knows it’s the most important decision you’ll ever make. So treat it that way.

As Sharon Eubank said, what the world has been calling freedom, isn’t freedom. It’s a recipe for societal ills. Self-control leads to freedom from all those societal ills. Who knew? Oh, yeah—every successful civilization in every millennium—including this one.