Good Morning Pioneer Baptist!

When our son Buzz was 2½ years old I bought him a big, bright, sparkling, toy tractor. It was fantastic!

Trouble was, Buzz couldn’t reach the pedals. The price was right, the toy was bright, but I wasn’t! I never had a tractor when I was a young kid, but I always secretly wanted one, and this was my chance to vicariously make up for those lost furrowed farmyards through my #1 son. But the timing was all wrong.

The timing will never be right for a movie like “Cuties.” Sexualizing the female gender has long been accepted throughout our culture, sometimes subtly, other times most blatantly, but when it comes to eleven year olds, you’ve got to be kidding me! Women are beautiful, attractive, and all the rest, and men have been on the prowl, I guess since Genesis. It’s never been right or proper within this frame of reference, but this is ridiculous. Hollywood, advertising, clothing industry; it all sells bigtime.

I’ve seen mothers dress their 3rd graders in ways that made me cringe. Indulgence of this sort is no good for the youngsters, and I’ll throw in “young-girl-beauty contests” right along with it. It’s bad enough when we parade our Miss America contestants around the stage at 17 years of age, and while they eliminated the “swimsuit competition” in 2018, before that it was young girls on display in bikinis that could never be classified as modest attire. We’ve been ridiculous on this matter, and now we’ve lowered the age to eleven? Again I say, are you kidding me? Who thinks this is O.K.?

It’s visuals for the voyeurs, and it’s exploitation of the pre-adolescents in extremely harmful ways. It panders to our lowest instincts, and does so at the peril of our precious young girls. No, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve seen clips on Fox news where Laura Ingram and others decry the sin nature of it. Jack Wyman, a fantastic writer and close personal friend of mine, has a blog called “A Word of Grace” and in his latest posting Jack writes “The Ugly Truth About Cuties” mentioning his own 11 year old granddaughter. Probably enough said right there for any father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother – really for any reasonable adult. Jack mentions also in relation to the soul of America, that “Politics is only a short way downstream from culture.”

I’m afraid our culture has traveled way far downstream from what God intended it to be, and from what God intended healthy relationships between men and women to be. Jack also pointedly said in his blog, “America, look in the mirror.”

We must look in that mirror, and what we see in our societal reflection is anything but cute. In fact, it’s ugly! “America, stand up for righteousness!”

Love to all,

Pastor