If you are unaware of the news story about the Stanford athlete, Brock Turner, convicted of sexual assault, you need to read what happened . The victim wrote a compelling statement describing the impact of the assault. Every student, parent and grandparent should read what she read aloud in the courtroom to her perpetrator. This will help you understand the trauma involved in sexual assault. She needs our prayers, as does the perpetrator.

Nothing excuses sexual assault. Nothing! But I have to ask, how did we get to the point where college age men become so calloused to violence toward women?

Do we really believe that moral failure, which is the root of the problem, is not a reflection of changing influences in our culture? Don’t get me wrong. Young Turner is fully responsible for his actions. His behavior was unconscionable, but is there any cultural culpability that needs to be addressed in order to prevent sexual assault from happening in the future?

These days, college students are coddled with “safe spaces” where no offense is to ever occur. When a student is offended, micro aggression charges fly with impunity. Thus, if a professor attempts to correct disrespectful or inappropriate behavior, micro aggression is now the defense. These professors are then vilified as intolerant and even fired. The voices of common sense and accountability are being silenced and eliminated because we don’t want to offend anyone. College, which used to be the place where students learned debate, critical thinking, and wisdom from their professors is now a one-sided diatribe of political correctness run amuck. The result is a lack of challenge to immoral thinking and basic values.

The notion of tolerance has been grossly distorted.  In order to be tolerant, you have to have disagreement. The point of tolerance is to disagree with civility and respect. You “tolerate” a difference of opinion.  Yet tolerance has become a one-sided concept–you agree with me or I will label you a bigot and a hater. You label my behavior and I will find a way to discredit you–just look at our presidential campaign if you want incessant examples. Someone decides which side of the argument is correct, and anything other than that will be attacked–the very essence of intolerance. Consequently, rudeness and disrespect run rampant.

Now let’s add the confusing and perverted messages related to sexuality promoted on college campuses. Universities support such outrageous events like Sex Week in which everything from sadomasochistic porn, demonstration of sex toys, lectures on how to have a threesome and live nudity in classrooms are promoted. This is a week in which women are objectified, reduced to objects and treated like sex toys. Pornography, which is reinforced and rampant on our campuses, activates the part of the brain that sees a person as a tool, an object. It creates unrealistic expectations regarding sex and is self-gratifying.  Then we are surprised that hormonal boys see women as objects for their pleasure? Again, not an excuse, but perhaps we need to address how this thinking gets molded.

And the biggest lie of all is telling women that if you willfully decide to participate in your own sexual objectification, this is empowering. Why is this allowed on campuses? Where are the feminists and protestors? Who in their right mind believes this is sex education? Objectification of women, pornographic training in a vacuum of morality–sex and lust apart from intimacy– and we think this doesn’t impact the way our students think when it comes to doing the right thing and treating each other as valuable? We think that by asking someone if they consent to a casual hook up on a campus, this will solve the problem of assault. We see no connection of the perversion of sex as only a physical act for someone’s self-gratification and sexual violence.  We eradicate the connection between sex and intimacy,  feed the perversion and call that normal.

And why do universities turn a blind eye to rampant illegal drug use and underage drinking since both are most often involved in sexual assault? We have decades of experience with unbridled substance use that characterizes our college campuses. Ask any college town emergency room doctor how many cases of alcohol poisoning and overdose he or she sees. But let’s just go with the solution of legalizing more drugs and push the message that drugs do not impact judgment or impair a person, and are harmless. Let’s continue to ignore the damage to the developing brains of undergraduates and view illegal substance abuse as a “right of passage”on campuses.

And finally, as long as I am ranting, let’s never be allowed to discuss the politically incorrect view that taking God out of culture results in the removal of the development of a moral compass in peoples’ lives.  We can’t present the position that left to our own devices, we are sinners, not good people who don’t get better without God; we are depraved and sinful people in need of redemption. We have to go off campus to say this because it may offend someone and violate the wrongly interpreted separation of church and state argument. It also flies in the face of secular humanism, the allowed religion on college campuses. Christianity is taught to be oppressive, bad, an illusion, only for the weak. Yet, look at the fall-out of excluding God from the public square.

A relationship with God gives people the power to stop doing bad things, to look at a drunk and unconscious woman and say, “I won’t take advantage of her. I won’t do horrific things to her. I need self-control. I won’t excuse drinking as a right to defile her. I won’t treat her as an object, as she is made in the image of God.”

God help us!