Premarital Sex Part III

by Aaron

Today's blog is meant give you a few more statistics (read them together with the last two weeks and it will all make sense). There are many people who speak of the virtues of 'sexual freedom' by which they mean free to have sex with any THING at any TIME. When the scriptures speak of 'sexual freedom' it is in the context of marriage; totally free in marriage with your spouse.

As I said last week, these statistics are to make you think, it is not ammunition to become self righteous. I firmly believe that marriage is NOT the answer, Jesus is. There is nothing before, or higher than, Jesus. Only by following Jesus we will begin to value what he values…and marriage will be restored.

  • 43% of US children live without their father [US Department of Census]
  • "Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families...those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated -- even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant." (Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University cited in "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Journal of Research on Adolescence 14 (September 2004): 369-397.)
  • 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes. [Criminal Justice & Behaviour, Vol 14, pp. 403-26, 1978]
  • 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of the Census)
  • 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (United States Center for Disease Control)
  • 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father. [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services press release, Friday, March 26, 1999]
  • 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. [US D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census]
  • 90% of adolescent repeat arsonists live with only their mother. [Wray Herbert, “Dousing the Kindlers,” Psychology Today, January, 1985, p. 28]
  • Fatherless boys and girls are four times more likely to need help for emotional or behavioral problems. [US D.H.H.S. news release, March 26, 1999]
  • 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes (National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools.)
  • 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988)
  • Boys who grow up in father-absent homes are more likely that those in father-present homes to have trouble establishing appropriate sex roles and gender identity.(P.L. Adams, J.R. Milner, and N.A. Schrepf, Fatherless Children, New York, Wiley Press, 1984).
  • In a longitudinal study of 1,197 fourth-grade students, researchers observed "greater levels of aggression in boys from mother-only households than from boys in mother-father households." (N. Vaden-Kierman, N. Ialongo, J. Pearson, and S. Kellam, "Household Family Structure and Children's Aggressive Behavior: A Longitudinal Study of Urban Elementary School Children," Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 23, no. 5 (1995).
  • Children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes. Almost twice as many high achievers come from two-parent homes as one-parent homes. (One-Parent Families and Their Children, Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 1990).
  • Only 13 percent of juvenile delinquents come from families in which the biological mother and father are married to each other. By contrast, 33 percent have parents who are either divorced or separated and 44 percent have parents who were never married.
  • The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families. (A. Anne Hill, June O'Neill, Underclass Behaviors in the United States, CUNY, Baruch College. 1993) 

I know, a lot of statistics. The purpose is to remind you that Satan is a liar and God has always told the truth. Let's trust Jesus for that truth and offer hope and healing to the rest of this world. 

We, at Element, do not divorce the ideas of marriage, sex, and children like the rest of our society does. We not only would like to see wild, passionate, nail biting sex saved for the context of marriage, but we would also like to see children saved for it as well.