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I say "currently" because I think there is long-term hope. Look at It Happened One Night. While that excellent film exhibits good sexual morality, it also displays behavior we consider unacceptable today: drunkenness, smoking, threats to "sock" the female star. Hollywood wouldn't include such elements today, because the culture changed. It got better. Bad behavior hurts, and eventually this becomes undeniable. Chastity has been such a fixture of human history that the current situation is wildly anomalous, and I expect it will eventually right itself, probably due to women realizing that promiscuity doesn't make them feel empowered, but endangered. It may even turn out, in a supreme irony, that the current phenomenon of transitory student lesbianism was just a strategy of desperation, the only way society currently allows young women to tell boys, "Go away, I'm not ready."

"God hates sin," some emphasize. But God hates sin like the parent of a leukemia victim hates cancer. God really does love the sinner. In order to reach the sinner we will have to love them, too, and offer ourselves humbly and authentically as examples of what God's power can do.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex, and Feminism (Conciliar, 2002).

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More about Frederica Mathewes-Green, including her e-mail list, publications, and speaking engagements, is available from her website.

Mathewes-Green was a columnist for Christianity Today. Her columns are available on our website.

Other Christianity Today articles on Sexuality & Gender include:

SPEAKING OUT
We're Still Supporting Slavery | New efforts to stop U.S. troops from visiting prostitutes abroad are a good step, but let's not whitewash what's happening. (Sept. 28, 2004)

Let's Talk Sex | What Christian books on the topic are, and are not, communicating. (May 28, 2004)

Hugh Hefner's Hollow Victory | How the Playboys magnate won the culture war, lost his soul, and left us with a mess to clean up. (Nov. 21, 2003)

Holy Sex | How it ravishes our souls. (Sept. 30, 2003)

The Truth About Sex | Even Christians get seduced by the sexual lies our culture proclaims. (Nov. 13, 2001)

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2