Press Release for Immediate Release – 12/02/02
The National Non-Sectarian Council of Pro-Family Activists
http://www.gendercentral.com/
Rabbi David Eidensohn - Director - Contact - 1-845-352-7267
(Used by Rabbi Eidensohn's permission on CR's Range)
A Commentary by
Rabbi David Eidensohn
Something happened on my way to writing an article about homosexuality and science. Commissioner Michael Heath of the Maine Fatherhood Commission asked me for an article on Fatherhood. When I finished it and continued my research, I found a radically different view of homosexuality. Indeed, I realized that I had discovered the Theory of UnRelativity. The Theory of UnRelativity is about not relating. It explains why Americans in just the past generation have stopped relating in marriage and family. Now I could connect the pieces of the collapse of family, marriage and the rise of homosexuality and gender-hate.
The first step in my Theory of Unrelativity was to answer a question: Why since the fifties did consumption double when wages just crept up? Not to spend what you don't have is a basic rule for family and indeed for all serious people. How then could consumption double and race far ahead of earnings? Is this not fiscal suicide? Is it worthy for anyone to throw it all away to buy a fancy car? If a few people did it, we would not notice. If, however, this becomes a national lifestyle, we must investigate: why?
This fact sounded an alarm for quite another reason. Whenever a major shift happens, we must notice it immediately, identify where it came from, and know where it is going. Although altering of the status quo may seem beneficial, if we don't know the underlying powers that produced it we cannot realize the direction we are going. The doubling of consumption is a severe change and for that alone it deserves study.
We know that the sixties changed America. The Viet Nam war certainly had a role in this. Was there anything else? When we see the great divide between before and after the sixties, we wonder if Viet Nam was the entire cause, or was it something greater?
Long after the Viet Nam war, the processes begun in the sixties, the decline of family, the alienation of minorities, has not ceased. The Clinton administration produced a study on fatherhood, chaired by Vice President Al Gore, which sought to determine the collapse of fatherhood, evident even then in 1997. When we look at the statistics today, in 2002, we realize that some enormous power is destroying American families. This failing of families is not an overstated hyperbole. As we write these words in October of 2002, the majority of eligible American adults do not marry. Half of first marriages end in divorce. The trend is that married women have fewer children and unmarried women have more children. The rate of white women having children out of wedlock has doubled and is rising. As men refuse marriage, as people marry later and have fewer children, the biological process of fatherhood produces millions of ! nonmarital babies. When these children turn to the state for help, the states have no resources to deal with them properly. There are no solutions to the failings of family, and the issue is not only a moral one. We are dealing with the fiscal collapse of the states and of American civilization. Our country has a six trillion dollar debt and an imminent debt for social security of ten billion dollars, and yet, it only earns two trillion dollars a year. Of this two trillion, we must pay a third of a trillion dollars just for the interest on the national debt. The states are groaning and cannot help the poor and sick with health insurance and medicine. Who will take care of the millions of babies born out of wedlock? As our population falls, who will support the older generation?
As America rejects formal family, the biological drives do not rest, and produce nonmarital children. The U.S. Census Bureau reports (June 20, 2001) that from 1970-2000, single mothers increased from 3-10 million, single fathers increased from 393,000 to 2 million. The Center of Disease Control Vital Statistics Report (October 18, 2000 Vol 48, Number 16) says that from 1970 to 1999 the number of "nonmarital births" rose from 200,000 to 1.3 million. In less than thirty years, this is a six-fold increase. Can we imagine 1.3 babies without formal families? Who will pay for this?
We cannot really digest such large numbers. We cannot assimilate properly that one generation ago single fathers and nonmarital births numbered in the low hundred thousands, and today in the low millions. We must notice the fact only to spur us on to solve the mystery. What is producing this?
The key word in our question and mystery was "consumption." Something drove consumption in recent generations to double. What was it? Al Gore's Fatherhood report says (page 1 of appendix C, paragraph 3): "Research has also shown that children are increasingly seen as interfering with the spousal relationship (Veroff, Douvan and Kulka, 1981). While young men and women in the U.S. claim to value marriage and children, their attitudes toward family formation, and the rising cost of child rearing appear to be in conflict with their increasing materialism and increasing aspirations for expensive consumer goods (Crimmins, Easterlin, and Saito, 1991). Importantly, adolescent males are significantly more likely than females to value such goods and rate owning such goods as very important, suggesting a higher priority of spending for themselves rather than providing for the expenses of a family (Crimmins, Easterlin, and! Saito, 1991)."
Here it is. In the past generation, consumption has reached such a priority that it now drowns out the basic instinct of family in both men and women, but especially men. Why is this?
The answer is television. Television first appeared on a national level in the fifties, and it taught consumption. Television is a business, not a box. The business of television is to sell what advertisers want to sell. Consumption is the soul of television. After a decade of television, America is afire to consume. Although the anger of the sixties is over, and even though America has a formidable conservative population, nobody has stopped consuming. The American ideal today is to take, not to give. Television taught this, and the hours and hours each week people watch the tube and learn to consume cannot be balanced by a visit to some spiritual leader once a week or once a month. People drive to the spiritual leader in a consumed car, much more expensive than necessary, and wear clothes that are probably overly expensive for their budgets.
A viewer programmed to consume will also consume ideas. People make television with not just entertainment in mind, but also education, persuasion, or "selling" concepts on gender, life, parenthood, etc. These ideas, and the cult of consuming for enjoyment sake, are a violation of biblical family forces. Family requires giving, not entertaining. Family is not direct entertainment. We give and give our all, and perhaps, if we do it right, we will merit a reciprocity that leaves us in wonder. Television has no patience for this kind of pleasure. Television wants pleasure now. Of course, it takes a while to get to the phone with your credit card, and UPS doesn't deliver on weekends, but you get things from TV faster than you do with family.
To prime the purse to spill over, television must convince people that they are the first and foremost thing in life, not others, not the future, not family and certainly not children. Television cannot survive in a family and biblical environment, not because it features violence and sex, but because it programs a viewer to be anti-biblical, to take and not give, to be egoistic and not modest, to be aggressive and not meek, to be tough and not kind. The biblical family culture is the source and sole salvation of family. Family can only survive by two people marrying to give and not to take. Marriage is a polarity of opposites who actualize only relative to the other. Their whole essence is the system, not themselves. Television, by playing to the individual, violates the nature of polaric processes and destroys marriage and certainly family.
The cycle of self-actualization and self-abnegation, asserting and vulnerability, is the pulse of polarity and the cycle of love and marriage. There is no taking unless the other gives. Giving creates taking and taking creates giving, because all giving and taking redefine and recreate the polarity positions. One who cannot go beyond taking cannot play the game.
In practical terms, the television era is here. We associate pleasure with consumer products, and we buy to sustain the gratification of the viewing moment. What else we do under the influence of television nobody knows, but they are probably inimical and deleterious. Television is a poison for the emotion, the soul and the wallet. Television is a drug more dangerous than marijuana. Family cannot survive television, nor can marriage.
Furthermore, a society of takers cannot survive, either.
To return to our opening sentence, I was on the subject of homosexuality and science when I came upon the Theory of Unrelativity and Television. Promiscuous homosexuality is exactly what television produces. Of course, red lights will flare up in the minds of the politically correct, but the statistics on homosexuals are clear: the culture is promiscuous and spreads disease in shocking social patterns. HIV/AIDS grew last year by 25%, and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases are exploding in the homosexual community. Homosexuality is not about giving; it is about taking. Homosexuality is so entertainment and pleasure oriented that risking AIDS is considered proper if one has transient pleasure. Condoms are considered a violation of the humanity of the television consumer, the pleasure-eater, who spends what he cannot, and who risks what he rues.
The pursuit of pleasure and ignoring the needs of others is exactly what the homosexual lobby demands. HIV Confidentiality Laws in New York and other Gay-Lobby states allow gay men to infect tens of thousands of people without the state intervening. The first to die are gays. Gays demand the repeal of pornography laws and the sexual pleasures of children because, "We are what we are." That is what television teaches you. Don't give. Don't conquer your weaknesses. Go for it. Take it. Be what you want. Don't deny in order to grow. Take in order to be. Be yourself, not somebody better. This is the Theory of Unrelativity: Do not relate to others to grow as you deny yourself. Do not actualize in proportion to how you give to others. Take and be what you are and enjoy the moment, no matter what.
The science of homosexuality, after a century of research, showed that homosexuality is related to problems with parents. What kind of people will grow up in a family of television? Will they be the kind encouraged by the American Psychological Association's Rind Report that pedophilia can be good for a child? Will the ultimate pleasure barrier fall, that limiting gays to people their own age? When we allow television to destroy our children, will they roam the streets to find love with those who pursue them, those who now claim that children seduce them?
There is a dimension of giving, of goodness and life, and a dimension of taking, of evil and death. Armed police prevent students from mass murdering each other in our public schools. The consumer eventually consumes itself. Taking of a life and even suicide is a form of consumption, the end of a line that begins with television.