Documentation Needed: Decline in Morality After Sexual Revolution

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Dear brethren:

I have a Lutheran friend who insists that no evidence exists that people are more sexually immoral are than they were 50 or 60 years ago - that the only difference is that people are more open now, about what they used to keep secret and what otherwise went undocumented.

How do I counter this?

A wikipedia article says the following:
*
There were, however, detrimental effects on the society because of this time period. Since the sexual revolution, out-of-wedlock births, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, and divorce have all risen considerably. Since the 60s, marriage has declined by a 1/3 and divorce has doubled. During the 1960s there were only four big STDs, now there are twenty-four. Since the sexual revolution, children living in single-parent families has tripled.*

However, nothing in this paragraph is documented! Nothing but the last sentence!

Can anyone point me to secular documentation for any (preferably all) this information?

Thanks!
 
Hmm… I can’t provide any documentation, but I did want to make a warning. Simply because something increased doesn’t indicate what caused it. For example, the population of the US in 1960 (pre-sexual revolution) was 179 million, but it is 303 million today. That means there are 59% more people in the US today, and that could explain part of any increase.

Another example would be the increase in divorce. This isn’t necessarily tied to the sexual revolution, but in part to the changing cultural attitudes towards marriage, and the increasing acceptability of divorce Another reason could be the permanent entry of women into the workforce, making it easier for a woman to support herself after divorce. Both of those things, in turn, relate to the changing attitudes towards the role and status of women.

The rise in prosperity (at least in the US) could also, in part, explain the rise of single-parent households,.Financially, single parents may have found it easier to maintain an independent household, rather than living with relatives. The increase in government funded social welfare programs may be part of it.

I’m not saying that the sexual revolution didn’t also affect those things. I am wanted to point out that you will need to disentangle the different causes, rather than simply relying on results and pinning all blame on the sexual revolution.
 
Dale_M said:
I’m not saying that the sexual revolution didn’t also affect those things. I am wanted to point out that you will need to disentangle the different causes, rather than simply relying on results and pinning all blame on the sexual revolution.
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Indeed, causes and effects are far more complex issues than discussions about naughty people trying to undermine the Great Golden Age of the 1950’s would suggest.
 
It is not a coincidence, either, the rise of pornography has led to the acceptance of anything goes sexually within our culture. Also, this same pornography, has it not led to the explosion of sexual crimes? As far as documentation, I am not sure, but I would like to see a study on the damaging effects of pornography, also.
 
I have no documentation at hand except my personal experience, having grown up in an era when there was zero teen pregnancy at my own or any nearby high school, no divorced parents in the entire neighborhood, no pornography available, no free condoms, although married people could buy them at the pharmacy counter, and in the movies, the boy never had sex with the girl until after they were married, and that was after the final credits.

Needless to say, a lot has changed.
 
For one, it is very difficult to give much evidence, because there were not a whole lot of sex surveys back in the day. The best measurement I can think of would be venereal disease rates, which are correlated with sexual immorality. These have been tracked and quantified for at least five hundred years, with more detailed records beginning (as with most records) towards the end of the 19th Century. I can’t think of any direct, reliable measurements of sexual immorality rates until after the Kinsey Reports. (The Kinsey Reports themselves, by the way, are horribly unreliable and are still in mainstream circulation mainly for the propaganda value in the culture war. DO NOT allow anyone to cite Kinsey at you.)

I’d look up some V.D. numbers for you, but I have to go, like, right now.

EDIT: As others have pointed out, divorce rates are useful – but not as useful as V.D. numbers, because divorce laws have changed a great deal in the past century. V.D. numbers, however, will still be distorted by events like the discovery of antibiotics and the rise of STD awareness. Hopefully those distortions will be easy to factor out of your analysis.

Second point: it is actually incumbent upon your friend to provide some evidence that people were lying about their sexual activity more back then than they are now. You don’t carry the burden of proof to show that they weren’t lying. Indeed, you can’t prove they weren’t lying. It’s impossible to do that in statistics. You simply have to believe your sample sets unless there’s good evidence that they’re not being honest.

Third point In fact, I’m not all that sure that there has been as large a decline as many Catholics believe. Yes, there has definitely been a decline in morality since the Pill was invented and abortion became a good idea. But the Gay Nineties (the 1890’s to you young’uns), the Roaring Twenties, and several parts of the early nineteenth century also saw great decadence in the West. Masturbation was perhaps as pervasive as it is today, as we can see from the anti-masturbation health scares and the fact that mankind invented the electric vibrator before the electric oven. Prostitution was one of the major problems faced by the early progressive movements. Even in those “wholesome” 1950s, there was a lot going on that we’ve forgotten about, because strict media self-censorship (like the Hayes Code, the Comics Code, and the television broadcast standards) meant that none of the immorality in the culture was recorded in media for posterity – except in demure and veiled references. (I was watching a 1957 Katherine Hepburn movie the other night in which I am certain she made a joke about becoming a lesbian… but using codewords so it wouldn’t get censored.) So, look for your data, but don’t expect a hockey stick graph with immorality exploding from 1960 onwards. Things were pretty bad, and always have been.

I take much hope for the present from this fact.
 
Kaninchen said:
Indeed, causes and effects are far more complex issues than discussions about naughty people trying to undermine the Great Golden Age of the 1950’s would suggest.
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The 1950s weren’t were golden of you were a white male. After that…maybe not always so much.
 
Lutheranteach said:
The 1950s weren’t were golden of you were a white male. After that…maybe not always so much.
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Discrimination was rampant in the 1950’s. But I don’t think one can say that family life among minorities was worse then than it is now. Was there a 70% out of wedlock pregnancy rate back then as there is now? Did most minority kids grow up without fathers, as they do now?
 
Speaking as “a child of the 50’s” and late 60’s college student, my personal experience certainly covers the period of “The Sexual Revolution”. As a student of history I can say that the situation has always been one of sin and depravity at one level, efforts at living a moral life for some. limited success, lots of preaching again with limited success.

We had girls drop out of high school because they were pregnant. The big difference was that when “a mistake” happened people “had to get married”. Pastoral clergy did what they could to reconcile what was and is sin with what was and is reality.

The history of the royal houses shows how they were filled with “lovers” and “bastards” who were often better people than the legimate heirs.

Perfect sexual morality will be ours, in Heaven when we live like the Angels and even get to rule over them.
 
The difference between now and then is that people sinned, picked themselves up, went to confession, and really tried to do better. Today it’s “yeah, whatever.” Or the opening song for Family Guy that spits on “those values on which we used to rely.” It took 40 years to gradually poison people. Every year, on the movies, and on TV, romantic love turned into ‘just sex.’ Morality? It’s all relative. What’s the big deal? We are living with the fruit of it. Time to stop, and turn around.

Information about the effects of pornography:

catholicnewsagency.com/resource.php?n=1065

God bless,
Ed
 
JimG said:
Discrimination was rampant in the 1950’s. But I don’t think one can say that family life among minorities was worse then than it is now. Was there a 70% out of wedlock pregnancy rate back then as there is now? Did most minority kids grow up without fathers, as they do now?
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I suggest you get a copy of Bill Cosby’s book, Come On People. Black people generally lived in black neighborhoods but black parents, and neighbors, behaved just like those in white neighborhoods. I heard Mr. Cosby on TV talk about how his mom knew if he had done anything bad on his way home from school before he got there. People, black and white, looked after each other’s kids.

For those who think there was something wrong with family life in the 1950s and 60s, I’ll just quote what a black father in Detroit in 2010 said after a boy he knew was gunned down: “We’ve got to sit down at the dinner table again.” He, and we, should realize what we all lost when ‘rights’ went out of control from 1970 to 2010.

God bless,
Ed
 
I agree with the earlier comment that tracking the number of cases for the various sexually transmitted diseases would be one measure of promiscuity. And it could reasonably be argued that promiscuity is a key feature of the sexual revolution. If you can find a graph showing the increase over the past 50 years, I think it would be valuable for making your point.

Unmarried pregnancies might also be a measure, if you can find statistics for it and how it changed during the past 50 years But as I mentioned earlier, single-parent households is a probably a bad measure, since increased affluence of the country (and government welfare payments) may have enabled women to establish their own household, rather than to live with relatives as in the past.

BTW, I earlier mentioned that US population has increased by 59% since 1960. But that is wrong - it increased by 69%. Thank you, everyone, for not pouncing on my mistake. 😊
 
edwest2 said:
I suggest you get a copy of Bill Cosby’s book, Come On People. Black people generally lived in black neighborhoods but black parents, and neighbors, behaved just like those in white neighborhoods. I heard Mr. Cosby on TV talk about how his mom knew if he had done anything bad on his way home from school before he got there. People, black and white, looked after each other’s kids.

For those who think there was something wrong with family life in the 1950s and 60s, I’ll just quote what a black father in Detroit in 2010 said after a boy he knew was gunned down: “We’ve got to sit down at the dinner table again.” He, and we, should realize what we all lost when ‘rights’ went out of control from 1970 to 2010.

God bless,
Ed
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Thanks; this sounds like a book I would like to read. It seems to reaffirm my perception that in the 1950’s at least, family life was pretty much intact among both blacks and whites. Somehow, the government’s attempts to help minorities through various social programs resulted in the adverse consequence of inflicting a 70% out of wedlock pregnancy rate on them.
 
In 1960, three quarters of black children were born to married couples. By 1965, the new welfare system encouraged fathers to be absent from the family.

leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/welfare.html

Another social experiment that took some of the responsibility of raising his children off the father.

God bless,
Ed
 
edwest2 said:
In 1960, three quarters of black children were born to married couples. By 1965, the new welfare system encouraged fathers to be absent from the family.

leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/welfare.html

Another social experiment that took some of the responsibility of raising his children off the father.

God bless,
Ed
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In 1960, 75% born to married couples.
Now, according to your linked article, 88% born to unmarried women.

How to destroy families in a single generation.

And those born after 1960 probably think this is normal.
 
JimG said:
In 1960, 75% born to married couples.
Now, according to your linked article, 88% born to unmarried women.

How to destroy families in a single generation.

And those born after 1960 probably think this is normal.
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What do they know if they are not properly taught? The news has been turned into the celebrity showcase, a few press releases and the latest deaths and tragedies. The information superhighway is overloaded with opinions that sometimes turn into facts. “My buddy’s friend Bob said _____ and I believe him cause he wouldn’t lie about that.”

People are for developing critical thinking skills but what does that mean if there is no common foundation for behavior?

God bless,
Ed
 
Wowbagger said:
So, look for your data, but don’t expect a hockey stick graph with immorality exploding from 1960 onwards. Things were pretty bad, and always have been.
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Yes, there has always been sexual immorality in the world. But it has not ever been on this large of scale. It is now pumped into every corner of the world by the mass media. Pornography is streamed right into the privacy of your home. There has never been such a large portion of society affected by sexual immorality as there is today.
 
andyandely1997 said:
Yes, there has always been sexual immorality in the world. But it has not ever been on this large of scale. It is now pumped into every corner of the world by the mass media. Pornography is streamed right into the privacy of your home. There has never been such a large portion of society affected by sexual immorality as there is today.
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I have to agree with this. The Roman Empire in its waning days was awash with porn, but it was less easily produced and distributed back then. It wasn’t available to 12 year olds at the click of a mouse. Heck, it wasn’t even real widely available in the world today until after the invention of the Internet.

I remember a bookstore in my hometown that carried a wide selection of material, but the porn was segregated to a small nook in the back. Later, when I visited, I noticed that the porn had taken over the entire front of the store, and the normal material was relegated to the back. I haven’t been back lately, but most likely business is down because people who want the porn need only a computer and an internet connection.

The innocence of children of the last few generations has been systematically destroyed at earlier and earlier ages.
 
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