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'Prime-time debauchery' makes mockery of fidelity
Thursday, February 1, 2001
Fox's
Temptation Island.
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By GREGORY J. RUMMO
Special to The Record
Fox TV
has achieved a new nadir in entertainment. The network
that brought us "Who Wants to Marry a
Multimillionaire?" has tapped into the viewing
public's thirst for reality shows. By combining
voyeurism and steamy sex, Fox executives hope to create
the ultimate in prime-time titillation --
"Temptation Island."
"Temptation Island" is prime-time
debauchery -- Sodom and Gomorrah with no angels sent to
save the righteous.
In the first episode, four unmarried but
"seriously committed" couples are brought to
an exotic island off the coast of Belize. There, they
are introduced to 26 singles. The sole purpose is to
test the couples' relationships in the face of sexual
temptation.
The location is a tropical paradise, and the music is
sensual. The guys are hunks and the women are lookers.
Andy, one of the "committed" guys, equated the
lineup of women with "the Pepsi challenge where the
ladies were the actual soft drinks."
But Billy, another one of the "committed"
guys, opens the show with a bleak soliloquy: "I
feel like I sold my soul to do something fantastic. . .
. Now that the fun is over, and I am paying for it, I
hate to say, it's a mistake, but now I am in hell."
Another one of the men in a committed relationship
remarks: "This seriously scares the hell out of
me."
It ought to.
"Fox has set out to do for courtship what it did
for the institution of marriage with 'Who Wants to Marry
a Multimillionaire?' " says Charles Colson, Prison
Fellowship Ministry's president and former
Nixon-administration aide. " 'Temptation Island'
trivializes courtship for the same purpose. It makes
light of one of the most important promises we can make.
The promise to be faithful and honor our commitments is
turned into fodder for soap-opera dramatics."
"From a Christian perspective," explains
the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, the chairman of the
Washington, D.C.-based Traditional Values Coalition,
"Fox TV has turned the Lord's Prayer upside down.
In it, the Lord Jesus tells his followers that they
should pray that God would lead them away from
temptation and deliver them from evil."
And it's not as though this trash can be avoided by
simply using the on-off switch. Trailers for the show
were aired repeatedly during the Christmas and New
Year's weekends. "Temptation" promos even
appeared during the network's Christmas Eve broadcast of
"Miracle on 34th Street," a movie that
undoubtedly attracted a large number of families with
children.
Leave it to the network that brings us the NFL on
Sunday afternoons to debase sex to the level of a
"sport."
Dr. Archibald Hart, author of "The Sexual
Man" (Word Publications), writes: "Sex has
become dehumanized. In many circles, it is no longer
regarded as an act between loving, responsible couples.
Sex has become a sport. And in sports, there is a strong
desire to improve one's performance."
When sexual relations between a man and a woman are
turned into sport, the twin pillars of family and
fidelity are weakened. Former President Bill Clinton
reinforced this dangerous trend when he tried to
convince the public that his extramarital affair during
office hours with a young intern wasn't really sex at
all.
His behavior is already bearing poisonous fruit.
According to a story about teen sexual activity
published in The New York Times on Dec. 19, many young
people are now echoing the former president's
hair-splitting logic. Experts "have found that many
young people perceive oral and anal sex as something
other from sex -- and often, even, as abstinence."
Are we blind to the consequences of this trend?
"The public health risks of oral and anal sex
are real," the Times continues. The story notes
that "a health screening project among middle
school students" in Georgia intended to find cases
of meningitis had stumbled on several cases of gonorrhea
of the throat among adolescent girls.
Fox tried to minimize the criticism they most
certainly anticipated would come their way by choosing
"committed" instead of married couples. But to
believe that a couple can be truly committed without
being married is nonsense. This is evidenced by the
remarks of one of the women who describes her committed
relationship as being "in a unit," as opposed
to being "out there."
In a unit? Whatever happened to "shacking
up," "fornicating," or "living in
sin"?
"I object to the term that these people are
committed," said TV Guide writer Mark Schwed, in an
appearance on "Hannity and Colmes" on Fox News
last month. "If they were committed, they would be
married. There's not one ring on any of these people's
fingers," he noted.
The institution of marriage establishes the true
definition of a committed couple, which in turn is the
fundamental building block of society. This concept was
so important to God that he wasted no time establishing
marriage as something sacred.
"For this reason a man will leave his father and
mother and be united to his wife, and they will become
one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). God made it clear that
his rule was one wife for one life.
Throughout the Old Testament, we see great biblical
heroes fall prey to a weakness for women -- David,
Solomon, and Samson, to name a few. But interlaced with
the anecdotes of lust and promiscuity is the
condemnation of a righteous God -- a commentary missing
from "Temptation Island" and from our 21st
century discourse on sexual mores.
In "Every Man's Battle" (Water Brook
Press), Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker write:
"Because our standards on sexual purity have been
so mixed with God's, many men have no clue about God's
standard for sexual purity. We're commanded to avoid
sexual impurity in almost every book of the New
Testament."
Such warnings are lost on the pundits of modernity.
Pleasure is their god and ambivalence the attitude
toward the repercussions caused by their active
disparagement of America's long-standing Judeo-Christian
values.
"Modern culture has abandoned more than 20
centuries of Western tradition that adheres to a
transcendent standard of right and wrong," writes
Colson in "A Dance With Deception" (Word
Publishing).
In "The Things That Matter Most" (Harper
Collins/Zondervan), syndicated columnist Cal Thomas
cautions, "When marriage vows are trivialized, when
adultery is winked at (usually by men, who remain in
control of much of the media), this, too, sends an
important signal to the culture about what does and does
not matter."
"Temptation Island" signals that
traditional sexual morality does not matter to a large
segment of the American public.
To those who scoff at God's standard for sexual
purity, the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews
warns: "Marriage should be honored by all, and the
marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer
and all the sexually immoral" (Hebrews 13:4).
And that should be enough to scare the hell out of us
all -- literally.
* * *
The View from the Grass
Roots—Another Look, is the second book in the
Grass
Roots series of commentaries on American Culture by
award winning syndicated columnist Gregory
J. Rummo. Covering the
period from 2002-2004, with a few columns from 2001
sprinkled throughout, this volume offers food
for both mind and soul. Chapter titles include
Adoption, Family Life, The Triumph of the Bush Doctrine, More Missionary Adventures, Eating
-Our Favorite Pastime, Whose Money Is it Anyway?,
The Good the Bad and the
Ugly, Real Answers and six others. Humorous takes on the news are mixed in with poignant reflections
on the family, stories of travel to far away places
in the Third World and hard-hitting conservative
commentary on a number of cultural issues.
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