"Q. My daughter is a great fan of the Rolling Stones singing group. Is it true that one of them recently became a father without bothering to get married?

-Mrs. B.M.R., Buffalo.

A. Yes. Keith Richard and German actress Anita Pallenberg joined the handful of unblushing celebrities (such as Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, and others) to parent a child out of wedlock. The little Rolling Stone, Marlon, was born in King's College Hospital in Dulwich, London."1

Our Permissive Society

Those "unblushing celebrities" are contributing to and leaders in the moral decay of America, especially the morals of teen-agers! The trend of bachelor mothers and bachelor fathers really started with show business people--pop idols, movie stars. The London, England borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which is the home of the unisex boutiques and swinging miniskirts, report that of every thousand births 211 are illegitimate!! This trend is the result of our permissive society.

America's permissive society condones and tolerates moral decadence, disrespect for law, unbridled vulgarity, obscenity, blasphemy, perversion, and public desecration of our cherished ideals and symbols. The majority of citizens do nothing to stop such, nor do the denominations because their leaders are filled with this ungodliness, disrespect for the Bible, and have taught the members the same!!! The Lord's church in many places is filled, too, with LICENTIOUSNESS.

Silence Must End

Concerned Americans need to awaken because it was Patrick Henry who said, "Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible," he added, "that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men ... A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom."

Though silence reigns from most Americans, the denominations, and many churches of Christ concerning LICENTIOUSNESS, the God who created the heavens, the earth, and the fullness therein still says, "Let marriage be had in honor among all, and let the bed be undefiled: for fornicators, and adulterers God will judge" (Heb. 13: 4). "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are: Adultery, fornication . . . of which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (Gal. 5:19-21).

Licentiousness is "lacking legal or moral restraints; esp.: disregarding sexual restraints."2 It appears that the United States of America is too far on the road to ever turn back and renounce LICENTIOUSNESS. Great nations such as Israel, Babylon, the Medes and Persians, Greece, Rome, France, and England traveled the LICENTIOUS ROAD and God brought their downfall! Such will be the case with America unless she returns to principles taught in the Bible. Christians have nothing to neither fear nor worry about, though our earthly country travels the LICENTIOUS ROAD. God will take care of His people, but we, as the church of Christ and as individual Christians, must renounce LICENTIOUSNESS in practice as well as in speech and thought, for Heaven is to be our Home. We then can "cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and declare unto my people their transgression, and their sins." (Isaiah 58: 1)

Footnotes

1. Ty Gardener's column in the Sunday paper of Columbus, Ohio.

2. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary.

TRUTH MAGAZINE, XV: 6, pp. 12-13
December 10, 1970