Gatekeepers of our dreams

By Ted Baehr

Hollywood, Calif. - A recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the homosexual marriage debate said, "The right can't win this one." Not so, the truth is that we can win it, because the wrong would destroy the future of our children and grandchildren.

In fact, this is a time when Nobel prize-winning scientists like Dr. Gary Becker and prestigious Ivy League institutions like Dartmouth College have found that babies are hardwired for a father and a mother. In fact, no one can replace a mother's care. Touching, cooing, and cuddling are not just pleasant activities; they are essential for the baby's cerebral frontal lobe to develop. This hardwired need cannot be fulfilled by some surrogate mother or caregiver, and a father is just as essential for the child to develop biologically.

Furthermore, the facts have shown that while a significant percentage of young adolescents may curiously explore same-sex relations, by the time they're 25, only a very small proportion - only 2.8 percent - are stuck in that adolescent stage of development. So with morality on our side, facts on our side, science on our side, and the survival of mankind on our side, how can we lose?

We can lose because we have abandoned the mass media of entertainment to those who value perversion and license over a healthy society, a long productive life, and prosperity. Susan Sarandon has said that the media elite are the keepers of our dreams, and they've been injecting nightmares into our culture, demonic visions promoting lust, porno violence, and perversion. To refute these dreams, we have relied on articles like this, and on preaching, teaching, and the facts, but it doesn't work.

The keepers of our dreams in Hollywood understand, as did their forefathers such as Dr. Joseph Goebbels, that "the play is the thing that captures the attention of the king." Goebbels tried documentaries and propaganda campaigns to destroy the morality of the German people and failed. Then, he started making dramatic movies like I ACCUSE, and he perverted the German people from being 90% against "mercy killing" of unwanted people to 60% in favor of it. His successors of perversion have implanted porno-erotic nightmares into our minds. They understand the power of the story. They have few resources, but they use them well.

Every year, the church and charity takes more than 25 times more money than movies do at the box office. Yet, churches have not used their resources to create compelling stories to shape our culture. Jesus understood the power of stories; He used parables in most of His preaching and teaching, but only once did He give a Sermon on the Mount.

The message is that if we want to win the battle for the future of our families, for our children and grandchildren, we need to create the stories that will give people a vision of truth, love, and hope, and help them understand that the way of perversion is death.

Christian churches need to start supporting Christians who make entertaining, successful mainstream movies, videos, and TV programs that promote a Christocentric, biblical worldview, but a worldview which does not compromise the moral and spiritual values taught by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. After all, Jesus Christ minced no words in Mark 7:20-23 when He declared, in no uncertain terms that all sex outside of heterosexual marriage, all murder, all slander, all deceit, all arrogance, all greed, all malice, all stealing, and all lewdness to be evil.

We seem to have lost this sense of evil in today's culture, even in our churches but especially in the entertainment we feed our children and grandchildren. We need to ask ourselves, therefore, what are we, as people of the Book, doing to recover this Great Truth? Why are we surrendering the souls of our children to the Enemy, to do with as he will? If churches and parents will not protect the eyes of innocence, who will?