Planned Parenthood wants to teach sexual abandon in its “What is Virginity?” video, but the real lesson is how happily that group abandons honesty and rationality. Bad as it is, we can still use this video to teach our kids how to detect lies, even lies told with great production values.

Spotting fakes is only half the game in these days of deception, though, and the other half is more important yet. It’s one thing to hunt down lies. What about finding the truth?

We called the teacher in this video “Teacher” last time — not that real teachers like it, but this woman is no teacher. She’s an actor, probably trained in comedy, definitely coached to make a mockery out of real morality. The music and the setting help, obviously.

Great Lesson by Way of Great Contrast

So it works well enough on a mindlessly emotional level. I’m sure that’s why they produced it that way. They don’t have anything else to offer.

God does. It’s real, it’s true, and it’s very, very good. That’s the other message our kids need to hear. This video help tell it by way of contrast: Reality beats out fakery, truth is way better than lies, and the real good God offers is way better than the fake good they peddle.

Shame? Really?

We’ll pick up this second look at the video at about the 1:45 point. Our “Teacher” filled that time telling us what’s “wrong” with virginity. Now she wants to tell us what’s great about losing it.

Her transition there hinges on “shame.” If we had space I’d tell how that word belongs more to false, legalistic religion than in Christianity, where the words “guilt” and “sin” describes the problem, but where God in His infinite love saw us worth laying down His life to draw us up out of that guilt and into the freedom of life in Him.

We can’t stay there long, though, because we’re on another quest here. We’re going to see how Planned Parenthood’s version of the good life stacks up against God’s, and look at how we can explain difference to the young people we love.

The Bad Life, Dressed Up in a Fake PP Frame

PP does have a “good life” they want to sell us. No surprise there. Con men do, too. Teacher puts it this way. “It’s time to throw away the notion of losing your virginity,” she says. “What if instead of ‘losing something,’ we reframe it as gaining?”

Yeah, right. Forget reality, just focus on the frame. While you’re at it, why not also forget thinking of 2020 as a year of losing human lives and health and freedoms. Think of it as a year of growth instead: We gained whole new skills at living in isolation!

There’s your opportunity to tell your kids how to listen to these pitches. When they wind up to tell you what you can gain their way, keep your head clear, so you can ask whether it’s real and whether it’s worth it.

That clear mind is especially important when the sale comes in such impressive packaging as this one. “We aren’t setting ourselves up as losing anything at all,” says Teacher. “We hope we are gaining things, like intimacy, self-insight, pleasure, empowerment.”

How’s That Working For You, Bud?

Sounds great to me! But … hold on a minute. How’s that working for us? Take intimacy, for example. Our surgeon general raised an alarm last year on widespread loneliness. (He missed the point by miles, sad to say.) And when did that epidemic descend on us right? Right in the middle of all this so-called “intimacy.”

Granted, intimacy come in all kinds of ways, from family, to friendships, to the joy of creating together, to a thousand other forms. There’s even a kind of intimacy that can arise quickly, but it takes an experience of serious shared trauma, of the sort no one but the people we call “heroes” goes looking for.

Other than that, though, you’ll never get there without significant time together, or without real heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connection. Casual sex, in contrast, is over in a few minutes. And just how much of one’s whole person has to show up for it?

 “Casual intimacy” is a contradiction in terms.

Real Intimacy is Whole-Person Intimacy

You want real intimacy? Great! God wants that for you too!  You won’t find it stopping off together on the way home from your first or second date (or your 20th or 30th, even). It doesn’t come in flat, one-dimensional packaging.

Not even living together gives you the real thing. Cohabiting means not quite committing. It means holding something back in some safe place you can retreat to when it ends.

True male-female intimacy isn’t about sharing a bed, but about sharing an entire story together,  a tale in which both partners are full-fledged, fully human characters, living the ups and downs, the joys and the sorrows, the moments of hurt and of forgiveness together.

You can’t achieve whole-person intimacy like without whole-person vulnerability, and you’d be stupid to open yourself up that way without whole-person trust. That’s what marriage is for, and that’s why when when I said “partners” a moment ago, I was really thinking “spouses.”

Real Intimacy Is Real

Maybe you think that’s too ideal. I don’t know what kind of marriages you’ve seen or been a part of. I’m here to tell you anyway, it’s not impossible. My wife, Sara, and I have been blessed by God to experience it. We trust each other. We have reason to trust, going back long before we got married 37 years ago, and sex is actually a big part of it, meaning specifically our agreement to wait until it was right.

That agreement gave us opportunity to build an incredibly deep friendship, which by the way is real intimacy, too, taken in the right order. Even during our engagement we waited.

The result? It has been worth it many, many times over. Take travel, for example. When I’m out of town, Sara doesn’t have to worry: I waited to be with her at the right time then, and I’ll always wait to be with her — only her — at the right time now. And I’ve never had one moment’s doubt about what she was doing at home, either.

We’re not stupid or careless about it. We safeguard our trust with appropriate boundaries, but not with any sense of worry. We trust each other. That does wonders for trust, I’ll tell you.

God’s Heart for Us is Real

I know that not every couple has that same experience. I realize, thank God, there is more than one way to build trust, or to rebuild it. And I know that some individuals and couples never find a way to get to that level of connection. That grieves me in ways I cannot even describe. It grieves God’s heart even more.

I’ve dwelt a while on Teacher’s first lie, the one one about intimacy. Her other “gains” are just as fake. “Self-insight”? No. You might learning something about yourself, but you might not like it, and you’d better not confuse any of it with insight, much less wisdom.

“Pleasure”? Obviously it feels good. I can’t imagine it coming close to the real thing, though, where sharing sex together comes as an integral part of sharing your whole stories together as whole persons.

That’s what God intended for us, and it’s good. Very good. That’s why He put boundaries around what sex should be. Of course it’s for the sake of the children He wants us to bear through our love, too. That’s another crucial facet of this matter that I can’t take time for here.

Don’t Let Them Steal God’s Life From Your Kids!

I’m not sure it’s the first message our youth will be able to hear, anyway. They need to know God doesn’t give us harsh rules to make things worse. He gives us good instructions to make life better.

Jesus said in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” Planned Parenthood is a gang of thieves. Not content with just killing babies, they and their ideological cronies pour out their death-dealing deceptions on us all, day after day, but especially on young people.

That’s why we need to show them what’s really going on. So let’s flip PP on its head: Use this video against them, to give the young people in your life the tools they need to defend themselves.

And let them see and know the rest of the truth Jesus told in John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

 

Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream and the author or editor of six books, including the highly acclaimed Too Good To Be False: How Jesus’ Incomparable Character Reveals His Reality.