As a sampling of how this little piece hits home:

Why do Christian parents, contra St. Paul’s clear admonition in 1 Corinthians 7, encourage their young adult children to delay marriage, sometimes for years past the time it would take to discern whether this union would be of the Lord? Why do we smilingly tell them to wait until they can “afford” it? It is because, to our shame, we deem fornication a less awful reality than financial hardship. [Emphasis mine.]

Must reading.

A North Carolina judge has ordered a mother to stop homeschooling and send her children back to public school.

The judge could not even claim that the children were not being educated properly – indeed, he admitted that they had “thrived” under four years of homeschooling. (Outside testing had shown the children were up to two years in advance of their peers.) But they needed the “socialization” of public school, despite being involved in all sorts of out-of-the-home activities in sports and other clubs.

But the kicker: this ruling was part of a divorce proceeding, and came at the behest of the father, who acknowledges the divorce springs from his own adultery. But he doesn’t want the children homeschooled – in part, apparently, because he doesn’t want to pay for it.

This is the society we live in. Implicitly reward the adulterer with authority, rather than punish him. And interfere in the God-given authority of the innocent parent to direct the education of her own children.

It seems that environmental groups for once have been largely silent on the latter issue.

That aside, however, one of the centrepieces of the international agenda of the Left is to declare abortion a “fundamental human right” such that parents cannot interfere with the decision to abort that is made by a minor. (This is also part of the Freedom of Choice Act which president-elect Barack Obama has publicly committed himself to signing in short order after taking office.)

Yet if a minor has that sort of authority over his or her sexuality, it is plain to see that a minor is qualified to provide consent to enter a sexual relationship with an adult. Perhaps this is why Planned Parenthood has repeatedly been caught with its pants down in recent years, when counsellors turned a deaf ear to what, for all they knew, were egregious cases of statutory rape. (More recently, LiveActions Films have repeatedly drawn similar responses to abortion requests from Planned Parenthood all across the USA. Here is an example.)

Let’s not kid ourselves. Children who have “authority” to abort babies are going to be “granted authority” to have “consensual” sex with adults, whether heterosexual or not. The Left cannot have it both ways. They either must own up to their own ideology in practice (as seen in the Planned Parenthood cases), or they must admit that an underage girl is not equipped to make these sorts of decisions apart from the knowledge and consent of her parents.

This owning up will not happen, of course. The revolution of the Left has been advancing for many decades by way of desensitization. Admitting that pedophilia is part of the agenda would discredit the Left too much before the ideology has had sufficient opportunity to take practical root. Now is the time for vigilance, and to start stemming this tide.