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Man up - save our children

By Warwick Marsh - posted Tuesday, 10 November 2009


“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” These words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) a German academic and Christian minister, still ring true today. One of the reasons his words still live on is because Bonhoeffer was a man who stood up for what he believed, and in doing so, paid the ultimate price.

Bonhoeffer’s promising academic and ecclesiastical career was dramatically altered with Nazi accession to power on January 30, 1933. He was a determined opponent of the regime from its first days. Two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address attacking Hitler, in which he warned Germany against slipping into an idolatrous cult of the Führer (leader), who could very well turn out to be Verführer (mis-leader, or seducer). He was cut off the air in the middle of a sentence.

In April of the same year, he raised the first and virtually lone voice for church resistance to Hitler's persecution of Jews when he declared that church must not simply "bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself”. In today’s street talk Bonhoeffer was able to “man up” against Hitler!

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He then spent the next 12 years of his life standing up for what he believed in a very depraved and sick society. That same society, emboldened in the nation state of Germany, went on to kill six million Jews, many of them children. Not only Jews but gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped. All who did not conform to the political correctness of the ruling Nazi elite.

Bonhoeffer’s brave stand against Hitler as an evil seducer so early in his reign proved eerily prophetic. Adolf Hitler, according to Bruce Harris, was the undisputed, all-time, world champion of killers. Directly responsible for the deaths of more than 46 million Europeans plus the deaths of 13 million people from other parts of the world and the destruction of much of Europe.

Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on April 8, 1945, by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a court-martial without witnesses, a proper defence, or even a record of proceedings in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before the Americans liberated Flossenburg concentration camp and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. The execution was brutal. Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with thin wire to ensure strangulation.

The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer ... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

Well may you ask the question, “What has this got to do with me? I thought this was about saving our children, not a history lecture.”

For starters, all good fathers should become students of history. How can we teach our children to do well, as the song says, if we don’t learn from history ourselves? Second, our children need good fathers. Good men become good fathers and good men always man up. “If we don’t stand for something as men we will fall for anything.” Dietrich stood for what he believed and many would argue he failed, but history has proved him right even in his death.

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Today, more than ever, this world needs men - men who will make a stand for the truth against evil no matter what the cost. Today the Hitler’s of this world are not as obvious as they were at the height of World War II. They inhabit many of the “isms” of this world: materialism, individualism, hedonism, political correctivism, hypersexualism, pantheism, relativism, pessimism and fatalism - false ideologies that work against children to destroy them and rob them of their dreams and their innocence.

False ideologies that rob children of their biological birthright to a mother and a father. False ideologies that place so called “adult rights” to porn above our children’s rights to live lives free of adult sexual exploitation.

When Jesus Christ was questioned by Pilate in a mock trial he told him, “I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of the truth listens to me.” Pilate, like Hitler, didn’t want to listen to the truth and so he killed the Prince of Peace. Washing his hands could not remove his guilt. Jesus was a real man and stood for truth and also died as a result.

Many would argue that he failed but again history proved him right. The grave could not hold him. The grave will never hold a man who stands for the truth.

In the end good will always triumph over evil but not without a fight, and not without a cost. Evil will always exact a price. In Hitler’s case it was 59 million lives worldwide. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.

Today, more than ever, our world needs men who will do more than nothing; men who will make a stand for what is right and for our children. Men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who lived and died for the next generation.

Evil has many permutations. You may have noticed that I included hypersexualism as one of the many “isms” that modern day men have to fight against in order to preserve our society and save our children. This is probably the hardest fight for any man because it is a very personal struggle. We are created as sexual beings, but it is a fight we must engage in if we are to enter into manhood.

Most women do not understand the struggle men go through because they do not live in a male body with a male mind. A man’s body has between 40-60 times more testosterone than a woman’s body. Dr Allan Meyer, author of Valiant Man says, “Women live in an oestrogen mist and men live in a testosterone fog”. The book’s subtitle tells it well, Sexual Integrity in a Sex Crazy World. The corporate pornographers and advertisers exploit a man’s susceptibility to the beauty of the naked female form and high levels of testosterone.

Many would argue that the fight against the disease of hypersexualism is an exercise in hyperbole and is a product of an overactive mind. My simple answer is, ask the children. “The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children”. The biggest losers in the hypersexualisation of our society are our children:

  • two thirds of sex crimes in Australia are committed against our children;
  • 84 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls have had exposure to internet pornography;
  • 73 per cent of boys and 11 per cent or girls have watched X-rated videos;
  • 18 per cent of women report being abused before the age of 16;
  • the risk of sexual violence doubles in adulthood for women who were abused as a child;
  • men in prison for sexual assault has doubled since 1988;
  • 95 per cent of child sex offenders escape conviction;
  • according to Dr Andrea Louis, director of the South Australian Sexual Offenders Treatment program, viewing child pornography could be a training ground for becoming an active child molester; and
  • the Australian Law Reform Commission has found that the number of children needing protection has tripled in ten years from 91,734 to 309,517.

(Facts taken from here and here.)

According to the above statistics our society is on a similar journey to the people in pre-war Germany and it is getting sicker and more depraved by the moment. Just like the proverbial frog slowly getting boiled in water we don’t realise until it is too late. The pornographication of our society, a phrase coined by Clive Hamilton, is producing a nation of pedophiles. The abused becomes the abuser and with each generation the cycle worsens.

The good news is that there are some brave women who are making a stand against this attack of hypersexualism. Melinda Tankard Reist is author of Getting Real - Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls. Melinda is also one of the co-founders of Women’s Forum Australia which has brought together some of the best of the best on this subject such as Maggie Hamilton, author of What is Happening to our Girls? The subtitle on this book reads, Too much, Too soon, How our kids are overstimulated, oversold and oversexed.

Another heroine featured in Getting Real is stand up comedian and mother of two, Julie Gale. Julie founded Kids Free 2B Kids in 2007 because she was concerned about the increasing sexualisation of kids in the media, advertising and clothing industries. In 2008 Julie spearheaded the campaign to get extreme porn out of our petrol stations. Thankfully Shell/Coles Express and BP said “yes”. She is still waiting for others to follow their example.

At a recent forum at the High Court Cafeteria, these three women spoke passionately about the need to stop the sexualisation of our children.

Maggie Hamilton told of schools in Queensland where they have had to station security guards at the toilet blocks in the kindergartens because young five-year-old boys are forcing young five-year-old girls to perform sex acts on them. Melinda Tankard Reist in Getting Real said “Pornography is also used to groom children for sex, normalising graphic depictions of sex acts in a child’s psyche. Growing numbers of children are even acting out on other children what they have seen in porn.

The Courier-Mail reported the case of a seven-year-old girl performing oral sex on a boy during lunch time. “The witness said the boy had menaced the girl and threatened her with violence.” (September 13, 2008) Unfortunately these stories are becoming increasingly common but where are the men, where are the fathers?

Thankfully there are still some men left like Jack Sonnemann from Australian Federation for the Family who almost single-handedly got rid of Playboy, the preferred magazine for pedophiles from Australia’s newsagents in 2001. He is also famous for producing the sticker “Real Men Don’t Use Porn”.

Another man a lot of girls will be thankful for is Kelsey Doherty, a young man who has created the website, Demand Your Dignity, a new website for women “from the men who love them, encourage women to demand their dignity”. Doherty says, “The sexualisation of popular culture and media is destroying entire generations of young people”. He charges that pornography has enabled men “to seek only their own needs” and that women are worse off because of the idealisation of “a certain body type and sexual attitude” … The answer to the “pain” some women find themselves in is “Christ-like, selfless men”.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “We must become the change we seek”. Australia needs a new generation of men who, like Kelsey Doherty will man up against the evil seducers of our culture, no matter what the cost.

Australia needs men who will challenge the corporate pedophiles and porn kings who put profit before people. Our children need true fathers who will put the women and children of Australia first. Men who will be man enough to admit their sex drive sometimes controls them in the wrong way and brave enough to seek the help they need to turn around before it is too late.

Australia needs men who will be inspired by the sacrifice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and realise that the pathway to true manhood demands that we man up against the “Hitler’s” of our day, because that is the only way to save our children.

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About the Author

Warwick Marsh is the founder of the Dads4Kids Fatherhood Foundation with his wife Alison. They have five children and two grandchildren and have been married for 34 years.

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