by John A. Howard. Ph.D.

When two young men slaughtered their fellow students at Columbine High School, America was horrified. The school shootings had to stop. Surveillance cameras, metal detectors and extra counselors were provided and a national campaign for stricter gun controls was launched. Unfortunately, whoever planned these remedies doesn’t understand the problem. The young gunmen are, to put it bluntly, savages. They are unable to recognize and refrain from an act of absolute evil. Moreover, they are the hapless victims of their nation’s default in its most fundamental obligation to its children.

Every society must train each new generation how to live responsibly as members of that particular group. In a free society, the young must be taught truthfulness, honesty, lawfulness, cooperation and the other traits required for civilized community life.

In America, this acculturating process worked quite well until World War II. The families, churches, schools and other social institutions helped the young learn the standards of acceptable conduct, largely drawn from the Ten Commandments. With widespread support for these standards, the young learned the norms of behavior just as they learned the language.

All this has changed. The ancient concepts of right and wrong have been generally rejected. People have been encouraged to do whatever they judge right for themselves. God has been sidelined and instructed to stay out of public deliberations.

The trendsetters in the universities, the media and other idea industries have accomplished this conversion from a Godly to an ungodly society by wielding three rhetorical weapons—academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Anyone advocating standards of right and wrong is labeled an enemy of freedom by the attack dogs in the idea industries. That label is so difficult to refute that most people back off and another nail is driven into the coffin of behavioral standards.

Is America, then, condemned to go on producing generations hostile to standards of civilized living, to go on cloning young savages? Perhaps. But maybe not.

Recently, 1600 delegates of widely diverse religious affiliations, coming from 65 countries, assembled in Geneva, Switzerland for the Second World Congress of Families. Their invitations read in part: "The family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage." The Congress was called to develop strategies to work against the social, economic and political forces that are weakening the bonds between husband and wife, parent and child and among the generations.

At the opening session, Dr. Allan Carlson of The Howard Center on Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, gave the opening address. It was his vision and initiative that created the Congress in 1996. He recalled that, in 1945, the United Nations had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That Declaration proclaimed that men and women have a right to marry and found a family which is the natural and fundamental unit of society and must be protected by the state.

Dr. Margaret Ogola, who heads a hospice in Kenya for HIV-positive orphans, told how the family is being torn apart in Africa. She said that religious taboos had effectively restricted sexual activity to married couples in tribal Africa. "By the late 1960’s," she reported, "the ideal of sex only between married men and women began to come apart…The collapse of the sacred nature of sex rapidly resulted in children born out of wedlock, marital breakdown, abandonment of children and the explosive increase in sexually transmitted diseases."

The cause of these devastating changes she listed as the powerful marketing and distribution of contraceptives, education that stressed individual rights but not responsibility and what she called "Planet Hollywood", which sends throughout the world a message that pleasure is the ultimate good.

The devastating increase in sexual disease, to which she referred, was highlighted in two recent Newsweek articles. The January 17 cover article is entitled "10 Million Orphans" and the subtitle refers to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and what can be done about it. As you can imagine, the what-can-be-done section is a replay of the Columbine High School response—mechanical and counseling remedies, ignoring completely the responsibilities of the individual.

The preceding week, George Wills’ column compared Africa’s AIDS tragedy to the Black Death in medieval Europe. "In the 14^th Century," Wills observed, "the problem was in the air, food and water…In Africa, AIDS is transmitted primarily by heterosexual sex. The problem is promiscuity."

Human society cannot survive mass promiscuity. Promiscuity is indiscriminate action without regard to the consequences. Sexual promiscuity indicates the act has no significance other than temporary pleasure. There are no considerations of family, commitment or consequences. Another category of promiscuity is schoolyard murdering where the thrill of power and fame, which the killers seek, is not inhibited by a concern for the consequences.

Madame Anwar Sadat, the widow of Egypt’s President, told the Congress, "without God, without the family, mankind is lost, left to wander and stumble blindly in a wilderness. When the family is sound and the relationship among its members is rooted in mutual love, trust, respect and dignity, only then can the entire community hope to be strong and weather the strains of life."

At the final session, the delegates from all over the world pledged their unified efforts to restore the natural family to its position as the most important human institution. This could be the most powerful possible remedy for Columbine and the cult of irresponsibility which plagues America.