text: John C. Rankin
  [excerpted from First the Gospel, Then Politics …, 1999, Vol. 2, never published]
  In the 1990s I spoke of the clergyman, “conservative” in his theology but “liberal” in his politics, who raised his concerns with me about “sexual politics.”
  I had spoken with him about the reality where 70-90 percent of all men incarcerated for serious crime grew up de facto or functionally without a father. It is the male chauvinism of such sexual irresponsibility that leaves pregnant women and mothers of newborns to fend for themselves – and if the child is not aborted in the womb, he or she is aborted in the power for healthy life choices by the crippling absence of fatherhood.
  Fatherless boys thus seek ersatz “families” in the inner cities, which outsiders call “gangs.” Without the socializing influence of present and loving fathers, they seek identity with other fatherless boys; and in the ghettos with limited employment opportunities, they easily fall into drug use, then drug selling; and then to protect their “gang” and drug-selling turfs, they buy guns, shoot each other, kill and maim innocent bystanders in drive-by shootings, and thus contribute to social chaos and multiple human misery. The misery they were given by sexually promiscuous and absent fathers is what they export at large to the culture around them. And the fatherless girls become sexual adjuncts and toys of the male “gang” members, and/or become prostitutes to support their drug habits. Thus, many die young, forsaken and miserable. And most of this evil can be directly traced back to sexual infidelities, especially in terms of male chauvinism. Traced back to the reversal order of sex, choice, life and/God.
  As I made this argument, I asked the clergyman: Does abortion-on-demand, the potential legalization of homosexual “marriage” (and its pre-cognates) [now fulfilled …], laws such as no-fault divorce, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), strengthen or weaken the marriage covenant and family? (AFDC is where, at that time, women, and especially teenage girls who would take advantage of it, could get more money from the government to live on if they had children out of wedlock then if they were married.) Is not the violence in the ghettos traced to a sexually promiscuous male chauvinism in particular? Do not “sexual politics” address the core of this issue? And if we want to address social and racial justice, is not the honoring of the marriage covenant the linchpin? He did not disagree.