{"id":850,"date":"2010-02-15T11:51:50","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T16:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dangeroustalk.net\/?p=850"},"modified":"2010-02-15T11:51:50","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T16:51:50","slug":"secular-family-values-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dangeroustalk.net\/?p=850","title":{"rendered":"Secular Family Values Groups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend, I was driving in the Washington DC area and came across two interesting billboards. On the surface, I thought these billboards were put up by religious groups because of what there message appeared to be. I was wrong and the messages were much better than I assumed they were.<\/p>\n

Here are the two billboards in question:<\/p>\n

\"marriage-works\"<\/p>\n

\"large_virgin_bb\"<\/p>\n

Both billboards were put out by the same group called, \u201cCampaign for our Children Inc.<\/a>\u201d were some very \u201cFocus on the Family\u201d like. I looked through there website quite a bit and found that they are not religious and in fact not what I thought they would be.<\/p>\n

My original thought was that the marriage billboard was trying to encourage people not to have sex and\/or live with each other until marriage. If the billboard were put out by a religious group like \u201cThe American Family Association\u201d that would surely have been the message. Instead, the message is to encourage people to wait until marriage to have children.<\/p>\n

That brings me to the second billboard. The obvious thought was that it was promoting abstinence only education. But what I discovered was that the Campaign for our Children (CfoC) promotes \u201cabstinence plus\u201d education. In other words, they are all for safe sex with condoms, the pill, or other contraceptives. Of course they think it is better to wait to have sex and I don\u2019t necessarily disagree with that. This type of family values campaign I can actually support.<\/p>\n

I am a little bothered by the CfoC resource list in which they do link to a few fundamentalist front groups like the Family Research Council and The Heritage Foundation. But for the most part, CfoC seems to be a secular group.<\/p>\n

I am interested to see if secular groups like this one can compete with the fundamentalist religion social advocacy groups. Will groups like CfoC force groups like Focus on the Family to alter their message or force them out to the advocacy business entirely?<\/p>\n

What do you think about these billboards? Would you think they were religious at first sight? What do you think about them now that you know they are not religious? What do you think about secular family values groups?
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\n\"Bookmark<\/a>