In the second installment of Live Action’s “The Truth About Sex” series, founder and president Lila Rose asks: “Why do you think the way you do about sex?” She explains that how we think about sex stems from how we think about ourselves – and we’ve all been conditioned to think about ourselves in a certain way.
Rose states that according to the historian Carl Trueman, the current sexual ideology stems from three stages: first, the self became psychologized. Next, psychology became sexualized, and finally, sexuality became politicized. Rose explores these three stages in greater depth in the video.
The self became psychologized
In the first stage, in which the self became psychologized, people began being taught from an early age to become independent and create their own identity. Rose says that as this stage took hold, education was no longer about truth, but about learning how to express what we feel. This led to “expressive individualism” – the belief that each person has a unique core feeling and intuition that should be expressed so individuality would be truly realized. In other words – “you are what you feel.”
Rose notes that we’ve been training kids from the earliest ages to be expressive individualists – meaning their highest obligation and sense of self is their personal feelings. This differs from using human nature and morality as guides of human happiness. It also redefines the definition of love, as it says love is no longer about the objective good about the other.
She explains that expressive individualism gives the individual limitless power to reject any correction from anyone else. It affects not just how we see ourselves, but also our relationships.
Psychology became sexualized
In this next stage, Rose explains that people are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined by their sexual desires. This movement was largely promulgated by Sigmund Freud, who said sexual desires are the core of who we are. It’s largely what we see today, as young people are taught to use their sexual urges as their first designations of identity, whether that be straight, gay, bi, or something else.
However, Rose says that sexual desires aren’t who you are. “Love is broader than what our sexual urges might be,” she explains.
Sexuality became politicized
If any sexual desires become a person’s identity, Rose says it follows that people believe those identities should be afforded special political rights. It then becomes the job of the government to protect whatever someone’s sexual identity is; if anyone disagrees, they are considered bigoted or hateful.
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In the video, Rose says that the flow of these three steps is how society has gotten to where it is today – a society in which people are confused about both their identity and reality.
“If your understanding of yourself and of reality is all in your feelings, and not in the whole of nature and your human nature, if your body’s own genitals and reproductive function isn’t ‘you’, but you can somehow be a big mistake, then you can come to believe all sorts of crazy things,” she explains.
“The solution,” she says, “is to rediscover a robust understanding of natural law morality. This is the idea that human nature and the natural world have a moral structure to them that is designed for human freedom and flourishing.”
“When we behave immorally, we violate our own human nature,” she says. “We need to recover natural law morality. It’s good for everyone…We want people to live maximally happy and free lives. Free to love. That’s the purpose of this whole series on sex.”
