"Offenses" All Around

by Mark Schneider

Among the many benefits society derives from its children one is, perhaps, not so obvious. Children instinctively, unless prematurely jaded, understand the difference between right and wrong and in this regard offer adults a reliable barometer of good and evil.

This observation hit me not too long ago when my eight year old son was riding with me in the car one afternoon. I was half listening to the radio. The station was NPR when suddenly the topic changed to a frank discussion about abortion. I quickly changed the channel. Why? Because I am not yet ready to introduce my child to the grim reality that people in America legally kill children in the womb. I know with certainty, from discussions we've had on other moral subjects but far less ominous, that my son would understand immediately that abortion is a great wrong. But much worse for his vulnerable soul would be the moral dissonance he would undoubtedly experience upon learning that such an act was the law of the land.

The same sort of thing has happened - me having to take steps to shield my children - concerning the subjects of homosexuality and gay marriage. How am I to explain such things? It is a terrible irony that adults are much better equipped to exercise the ethical malleability required to confuse in subtle shades of gray moral distinctions that to a child are simple and easily understood.

Now my eight year old is certainly aware that people lie, cheat, steal and murder. But he can already reconcile these things. There is less dissonance because, like him, at least for these sins the rest of society is in accord with his own moral conscience. He knows that the people that do these things, if caught, pay consequences. It makes sense to him that society condemns these acts and punishes them. That's why, in his mind, we need the police, whom he views with an appropriate measure of fear and reverence. The dissonance arises when society protects and even celebrates acts he knows by nature to be evil.

Try this test. Think about how you might feel explaining why the Allies during WWII had to kill Axis soldiers. Would explaining this historical fact present a moral dilemma to you? Is it something your child would struggle with emotionally? Probably not. But what about having to explain the topless nightclub or bath house downtown?

We can usually know something is wrong (that adults call right) when it becomes distasteful and unnatural to explain it to a child. A bad omen for our society is that it's getting much more difficult to avoid these unnatural conversations. Today, for instance, while watching a golf match on ABC I dared not abandon the remote during the commercials becuase of the constant bombardment of Sunday afternoon sports with commercial teasers from Desperate Housewives, the latest horror flick and other raunchy material. Dissonance. Neither can I allow my child freely, without vigilance, to look over my shoulder when I read the newspaper due to its inescapable and lurid content. Dissonance. In the mall on Saturday, I had to guard against walking past certain advertisements and stores that predictably parade and celebrate the sensual, grotesque and evil manifestations of Halloween. Dissonance. Confusion. It's everywhere these days.


For good reason our Lord cautioned...

"It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones" Luke 17: 1,2

Increasingly, it seems, the fear of millstones is going away.