Catholic Online | by Jennifer Hartline | 2/11/2010

In continuing the discussion about a sexual counter-revolution and defeating the culture of death, let’s also confront the need for a fashion revolution.

Every time I walk through the mall I feel this stab of pain in my gut. It also happens in Target, Wal-Mart, the doctor’s office, the grocery store; it even happens in church. I don’t need medication for this pain. It’s not a disease – it’s grief. I’m mourning the death of modesty.

Last week I read the most perfect definition of modesty on the website for the Archdiocese of Washington. Msgr. Charles Pope wrote that “modesty is reverence for mystery.” I can’t imagine a better way to define it. And sadly, in our culture, the mystery is GONE. And with it has gone all reverence, dignity, and respect.

I’m just so sick of seeing women “on display” everywhere I go. It’s inescapable and it’s gotten trashy. I feel sorry for men today – at least the men who are attempting to be gentlemen. Men are visual creatures by design, and now the poor guys can hardly raise their eyes off their shoes without being confronted by half-naked women they’re then not supposed to look at. It’s more than inconsiderate; it’s irresponsible and disrespectful.

Women “advertise” their physical assets in skin-tight, low-cut clothing that reveals more than it covers and then are offended when they aren’t given respect for their skill and intelligence. They market themselves to the world as a sex object and are shocked when they are treated as such.

And make no mistake, ladies, when you walk around with some of the clothing styles too often displayed in public, you are marketing yourself as a sex object whether you think so or not. There’s a neon sign over your head saying “Look at my body! Don’t you think I’m hot?”

There was a time when a woman’s appeal was multi-faceted; her poise, her intelligence, her manners, her wit and savvy, her skills, and yes, her feminine style. Today it seems the only criteria to be met is being sufficiently “hot.”

It’s bad enough that adult women’s fashion has become entirely about sex, but the real grief is that sex-centered clothing is now commonplace for young girls. It is appalling to see what has become acceptable in girls’ fashion. Not a day goes by that I don’t see little girls dressed in spaghetti straps and bare midriff tops and I think back to my girlhood and know that I never would have been allowed to leave the bathroom like that.

If by some fluke I’d managed to avoid being seen by my mother, I never would have made it past my father. Thank God. Of course, the point is that my parents taught me to be a modest young lady and thus I never had any desire to wear sexualized clothing. I would’ve been mortified.

I ache with sadness to realize that mothers and fathers today do not protect their daughters’ innocence and purity by dressing them modestly. Little girls are learning at a very young age that it’s okay for their bodies to be publicly “consumed” and their self-esteem and self-image is cemented to their sexual appeal.

From a tender age, the seeds of promiscuity are planted. From that seed can grow unmarried sex, STD’s, warped ideas about sex, unintended pregnancies, unhealthy body images, destructive relationships, broken hearts, and worst of all, babies killed by abortion. Go back step by step by step, and it begins with the absence of modesty…. no reverence for mystery.

I recently went a few e-mail rounds with the president of a children’s clothing company after I got their catalog in the mail and was shocked by what I saw. The catalog featured a swimsuit for little girls (I mean toddlers, here) that was simply two small fabric patches shaped like ladybugs held up by strings over the shoulders and back.

This was supposed to be “cute” on a little girl. Just enough fabric to cover her. When I wrote to express my outrage, I was told in reply that the staff – made up mostly of moms and grandmothers – was upset that I would impugn their choice of swimwear for little girls. They would never sell anything that was inappropriate or indecent, I was told. But they thanked me for my concern and assured me that they’d take it into consideration for next year’s line.

Please. We’re living in a culture that is saturated with sex and every possible perversion of sex. Is it really beyond the realm of common sense to realize that our daughters should not be half-naked in public, even if they’re only two years old? That swimsuit was a pedophile’s dream.

Is that really so hard to understand? As far as I’m concerned, to expose a little girl’s body in public in such a manner is neglectful and dangerous. It isn’t adorable, it’s stupid and reckless. It’s inviting trouble in so many ways.

Part of successful abstinence education among our kids is going to be a successful revival of modesty in dress for young ladies. Teach a young girl that her body is sacred and should be cherished and treated with care, show her how to present herself accordingly by the way she dresses, and that girl will be much less likely to throw away her purity.

Teach girls that it is their responsibility to themselves – and to young men they meet – to set the tone for how she expects a man to treat her. Clothe yourself with dignity, girls, and show yourself the respect you deserve. A gentleman will follow your lead. A guy who won’t should be shown the door.

Toward this end, I was absolutely delighted to learn from a Catholic Online colleague about Pure Fashion, a faith-based program designed to teach young girls to live the virtues of modesty and purity. Please read on with me in part two of this article and learn more about this very exciting program that is an answer to this mom’s prayers.

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Jennifer Hartline is a Catholic Army wife and stay-at-home mother of three precious kids who writes frequently on topics of Catholic faith and daily living. She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online.

HT: CatholicOnline

One of my all-time favorite movies reminds me that it often takes a bold act to awaken the conscience of a nation. It’s one of the most dramatic scenes in a really great movie. The movie is Amazing Grace. The scene is the House of Commons in the latter years of the eighteenth century. William Wilberforce stuns his parliamentary colleagues by unrolling an enormous scroll down the aisle. On the scroll were the signatures of 390,000 Englishmen, demanding that Parliament abolish the slave trade—the greatest moral issue of the day.

The signatures of nearly five percent of the country forced his reluctant, if not hostile, fellow members of Parliament to understand that the evil status quo could no longer stand.

Two hundred years later, in the spirit of Wilberforce, Christians across this country are affixing their signatures to another document as a way of saying “enough!”

Before Wilberforce presented his petition, slave traders and the economic interests that benefitted from the trade believed that they owned Parliament. That’s why it was called the rotten borough system. They literally bought seats! They believed they could ignore Wilberforce without repercussions. The petition showed them otherwise. It broke the back of their resistance.

Today, when it comes to sanctity of life, the traditional family and religious freedom, we are told that the cultural tide flows in only one direction—and that Christians should adapt.

Well, the last time I checked over 400,000 people have disagreed—loudly and clearly. They have signed the Manhattan Declaration, which, among other things, forcefully rejects the idea of Christians adapting to the cultural tide. It makes it clear that there are times when “civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.”

While it took years for Wilberforce to gather his petitions, thanks to the internet, it has only taken us only two months to get 400,000 signatures. But our goal is one million.

Not because one million is a round and impressive number, but because that kind of response has the potential to electrify the church and make the cultural elite take notice as it did in Wilberforce’s day.

The church needs to get over this business that “we can’t get involved in politics.” That’s an excuse. It needs to understand that bearing witness about the sanctity of life, the traditional family and religious liberty isn’t political – it’s profoundly moral. It’s about who we are as a church and our relationship to the rest of the culture.

Likewise, it’s about making it clear that the cultural elite cannot silence us simply by labeling our views out-of-bounds. It’s about their having to realize that they cannot silence the church, especially when it speaks authoritatively across confessional lines.

By telling them that we will not render to Caesar what is God’s we can break the stranglehold that the abortion lobby has on Congress and the stranglehold of the gay rights movement on politicians.

But this willingness to swim against the tied can come at a price. Like Martin Luther King, whose birthday the nation honored this week, we must be clear that an unjust law does not bind the Christian conscience. And that we’ll pay the price to oppose it as he did.

The church in America must say “enough!” We must strive to overcome the reluctance and hostility we face. Whatever else the supporters of the status quo may own, they do not own our consciences.

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We were invited to dinner with friends and extended family. Wonderful company. Good food. Stimulating intellects. All was well…until the conversation brushed up against two “untouchables” in a Southern home: religion and politics. As the exchange heated and civility gave way to raw emotion, a timid family Democrat pleaded for tolerance, entreated both sides to lay down their verbal firearms, and then abandoned the dinner table in search of safe harbor and warm, fuzzy house cats.

Relishing the beef tenderloin, I pondered the assets and liabilities of a tolerant society. Someone can think, say, or do anything, and others cannot question his thoughts, statements, or actions; but then, he cannot question anyone else’s, either. The upside ends there.

By definition, tolerance renders us impotent. Requiring passivity, it negates action. An ordered, lawful, moral, and virtuous life — as an individual, city, state, or nation — necessitates constant and intentional effort, often offending lesser angels of our personal or societal nature. In a letter to Mercy Warren in April 1776, John Adams wrote: “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” Study of our human nature confirms that left unbridled, it does not tend toward order or virtue. Human nature gravitates to chaos. Rather than right a troubled world, tolerance allows it to turn upside-down. At some point, we must choose, and fight boldly for, the principles that govern us.

Tolerance requires that we ignore “the law of non-contradiction.” The online Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) explains that “opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time” and suggests that Aristotle believed that “the principle of non-contradiction [is] a principle of scientific inquiry, reasoning, and communication that we cannot do without.” In a world of social and political tolerance, we do not inquire, we do not reason, we do not communicate…we do not respect…we tolerate.

Until both parties put aside agendas and assent to truth, legislative and political process based on tolerance of each other’s beliefs is futile and laughable…or at least it would be, were the consequences not so serious.

The result is a wasteland of abandoned principles.

Tolerance is the pry bar by which the modern liberal moves boundaries.

Robert H. Bork, in his introduction of Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1997), cites the Durkheim Constant: “Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can ‘afford to recognize.’” As behavior worsens, the community adjusts standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is gradually thought to be normal. However, Mr. Bork conjectures that the limits to deviant behavior have expanded in both directions, so that what was deviant is now considered normal, and what was moral is thought puritanical or extremist and therefore irrelevant. Modern liberalism makes every effort to redefine or blur (whichever is more expedient) both boundaries of the acceptable norm and label opponents as “intolerant.”

The controversy over the definition of marriage serves as an example of expansion of both boundaries. On the one hand, homosexuality was viewed as deviant behavior in the first two thirds of the 20th century. By the end, national politics encouraged the acceptance of gay lifestyles. On the other hand, a normal marriage has always brought to mind one man and one woman. Now progressives claim that the definition is too narrow and should include gay unions. To think otherwise in their view discloses intolerance and a homophobic prejudice.

In the name of polite statesmanship, conservatives have allowed the infringements and withdrawn traditional discernment and thereby relinquished boundaries on both sides of that vague line of normalcy. Mr. Bork summarizes: “So unrelenting is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted and apparently beyond our control.”

The liberal says that “ignorance leads to intolerance.” In fact, tolerance leads to ignorance. Bork recounts the liberal’s dilemma, quoting W.H. Auden: “Emancipated from traditional beliefs of a closed society … he [the liberal] has found no source or principle of direction to replace them … liberalism is at a loss to know how to handle him, for the only thing liberalism knows to offer is more [liberalism] … and that is his trouble.” With no mental exercise of discernment, rationale, or principle required, tolerance dulls the intellect and implies that we should deny our natural sensibilities while we renounce our discernments. Tolerance presumes that we ignore our capacity to determine and act upon right from wrong, truth from falsehood, or good from evil. Tolerance denies intelligence.

When we allow tolerance to trump principles, we become the allegorical crab in the stewpot. The chef slips the crab into a large pot of water at room temperature. Every few minutes he turns up the heat a few degrees, until the crab, roused from his stupor too late, acquiesces to the inevitable boil and winds up supper for those who would benefit from his stupidity.

Respect is the missing virtue. Respect requires us to move beyond transgressions and differences, accept the author of poor belief and action, and in the process, initiate change. Tolerance identifies the person and belief as one and the same. Respect recognizes their differences and embraces the person when his belief or action may be wrong. Tolerance is a very bland substitute for respect, and people despair to see our nation settle for the lesser.

Should our sensibilities stop at every discussion of ideology and consider all equal and worthy of embrace, even when they are not? As our country was established on Judeo-Christian principles, can the system allow for juxtaposed value systems and still be effective? Do we abandon virtues citing moral failures? Can we no longer discern right from wrong?

We scratch our heads and wonder, “How did we get to this point?” Perhaps we would be wise to recognize that borders, boundaries, and limitations, whether literal or figurative, geographical, political, or moral, serve to protect us and ensure a valuable legacy. In the words of the celebrated poet Robert Frost from Mending Wall, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall that wants it down.” Perhaps the neighbor better understood the pending consequences of vanishing boundaries with his reply:

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

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