Creech says study should motivate to address alcohol use and abuse, not promote safe-sex
One News Now
Chris Woodward, Reporter/Anchor
A new study out of Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health confirms that unprotected sex is more likely to occur after drinking, so one pastor thinks that should motivate Christians to address the abuse of alcohol rather than promote the message of safe sex.
Though the topic is not popular today, Dr. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League and the American Council on Alcohol Problems says the fact remains that where disease prevention is concerned, the failure rate for condoms is really high. He thinks people ought to realize that sex within the context of a life-long monogamous marriage — what it is intended for — is always safe.
“Protected promiscuity is not a part of God’s plan,” he notes. “But what I think we can learn from this is that we’re discovering every day the new links between seriously self-destructive behavior and the use and abuse of alcohol.”
Creech describes alcohol as one of the few legal commodities in the U.S. that is inherently dangerous. With every drink a person takes, the individual moves closer to acting out some form of regrettable behavior. “Alcohol doesn’t produce the behavior, mind you. But it most certainly greases the wheels for it,” he suggests.
And Creech cites a recently published book as evidence.
“Laura Sessions Stepp in her book, Unhooked, examined the culture of casual sex of young women in high school and college,” he explains. “Of the hundreds of young women that she interviewed, less than a half-dozen said that they were sober at the time. She said that alcohol is what fuels the unhooked culture among young people, especially those in college.”
He decides a new study like the one from Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health further affirms such research.
“[Stepp] said that these young women would drink for different reasons — some for the exhilarating high, sometimes because others around them were drinking. But many of them were drinking to quiet the cautionary voices in their heads,” Creech tells OneNewsNow.
So he finds it unfortunate that alcohol is largely a subject that much of evangelical Christianity no longer seems willing to address.
“We hear about the problem of gambling; we hear about sex, about abortion; we hear about the breakdown of the family and all of those things, but it’s also true more than we realize that alcohol is the social lubricant that energizes these negative actions,” he contends.
Basically, he agrees with Solomon’s words found in Proverbs 20: “Wine is a mocker.”
“In other words,” the pastor concludes, “it will make a fool of you, ‘and whoever is deceived thereby is not wise.
This story was posted on the American Family News Network’s (AFN) One News Now. It was posted on the Christian Action League’s web site by permission.
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