News that yet another sex club has opened shop in South Valley
is disturbing. Yet another neighborhood will follow the blueprint
designed by former neighbors of The Forum swingers’ club to try to
convince The Arena not to bring its clients to a rural residential
neighborhood just east of the Morgan Hill city limits.
News that yet another sex club has opened shop in South Valley is disturbing. Yet another neighborhood will follow the blueprint designed by former neighbors of The Forum swingers’ club to try to convince The Arena not to bring its clients to a rural residential neighborhood just east of the Morgan Hill city limits.
This time, rather than expound upon the importance of zoning laws and their enforcement, we’re asking bigger questions – such as why these types of clubs seem to have so many customers. One business is driven out of town and another one pops up. We think the swingers’ clubs are symptomatic of a much bigger problem, one that starts with parents.
As a society, we’re becoming inured to excess – whether it’s obscene violence, gluttonous quantities of food and material goods or graphic sex. Our children are exposed to so much of these through music, television, movies and the Internet – and at such a young age – that it takes more and more of everything to satisfy them as they get older.
Is it any wonder that when they reach adulthood, some need to go beyond the boundaries of what is considered acceptable behavior with activities such as swingers’ parties, for example?
Parents – take a close look at the music your children are listening to, the movies and television shows they are watching, the Web sites they’re visiting on the Internet and the books, magazines and e-mail messages they’re reading. Look at the clothes they’re wearing – they’re communicating with you with these choices.
It’s not uncommon to hear stories of second-graders listening to Eminem and watching South Park. How can their parents justify allowing young, impressionable minds access to such patently inappropriate material?
Children crave structure, guidelines and involved parents. Parents who throw up their hands with an exasperated “But all their friends are doing it,” are abdicating their responsibility and damaging society’s future.
As a society, we don’t just see the consequences with sex clubs in rural areas zoned for residential and agricultural use. We see them with ever-younger ages of sexual activity, with violence in schools, with drug and alcohol abuse, with teen pregnancy, with grandparents raising grandchildren abandoned by their parents.
We’re not advocating a return to Puritanism, and we’re not in favor of government regulating parenthood. But as a society, we’re all in this together, and the decisions we make as parents will reverberate for generations.
We’re urging parents to open their eyes and take a look at where society is today, and then think about how they’re raising their children. Do the rules you establish and enforce for your children promise to make the world a better place?
Maybe with more involved parents who are willing to tell their children “no” when they demand inappropriate materials, we’d have a society where swingers’ clubs are out of business due to lack of customers, rather than enforcement of zoning laws.
