If you were paying any attention to the presidential election, you probably heard quite a lot about a “war on women.”  Given that this was the battle cry of the losing side, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the so-called “war on women” failed to resonate with the electorate.  If my own thinking reflects the consensus on this subject, then people probably thought about the “war on women” the same way they think about the peloponnesian war or the punic wars or the war of the roses—those wars ended a long time ago—we aren’t fighting them anymore.

And there’s plenty of good reason to think this way.  Several women have now served on the Supreme Court.  Many women serve in the U.S. Congress, as governors and mayors.  We’ve had a female Speaker of the House.  Women have served as presidents and prime ministers of many foreign countries, and a woman has been the favorite to win the presidency of the U.S.A now for the entire election cycle.

In my professional career, I’ve had a female boss as often as I’ve had a male.  As far as salary goes, I haven’t seen any evidence of gender discrimination.  My wife and I both work in the same profession and are paid according to the exact same pay scale.  That’s how it is now for almost all professions.  The only piece of evidence I have seen to support the contrary thesis is the proverbial story of how some Hollywood starlet received nominally fewer gazillions of dollars than her male counterpart.  If that’s the case then perhaps there is a war on women in Hollywood.  Perhaps Hollywood has a problem with paying people what they are owed.  But a problem in Hollywood with treating people fairly is a problem with Hollywood.  It is possible that such limited problems get magnified in the minds of  the journalists who write on these topics because they are themselves too overly focused on Hollywood and the media world in general.  Outside of their own little Hollywood media bubble, the “war on women” is as over as the war of the roses or the war of 1812.

But there is war that is not over at all—not by a long shot.  And it’s a war on children.  I discuss this in a note in my book:

There emerges here a very important subtheme of the book. I’m talking about the victimization of children. It is easily the darkest chapter of American decline: There is a war on children in our country. The number of children aborted in this country is in the tens of millions. We have one of the worst infant mortality rates among industrialized countries (Ingraham, 2014). (See online: http:// http://www.washingtonpost.com/ blogs/ wonkblog/ wp/ 2014/ 09/ 29/ our-infant-mortality-rate-is-a-national-embarrassment/.) Sexual exploitation of minors is an epidemic. Mental illness in the young is skyrocketing. The homicide rate of children is astronomical (Lopez, 2014). There is just no denying it; it is no longer safe to be a

kid in America. Dr. Whybrow writes, “In England, where I grew up in the 1950s, 80 percent of children went to school without supervision, walking or riding a bicycle” (Whybrow, 2005, p. 131). The same was true for me growing up here in the United States in the seventies. But it is no longer true— because it is no longer safe. If you watch some of the old black and white movies and television shows, they depict a childhood that is familiar to those of us who grew up in an earlier generation, a bygone era when times were more innocent. Kids walked to school by themselves. They went to the store by themselves. They went to the movies by themselves. They delivered newspapers by themselves. They were free to roam about the town without worrying about their safety. But those happier and freer days are gone, quite possibly forever. They have vanished from the landscape of contemporary culture. There is no safe haven for children on the new immoral landscape. This is, without a doubt, the most palpable proof (if you are a parent of young children) that our society is lost in darkness: We are not enlightened. We are not moral. We are lost.

Gravino, John (2016-05-13). The Immoral Landscape (of the New Atheism): How Human Nature Poisons Everything and Why the Church Is Our Only Hope for Survival (Kindle Locations 4980-4995). CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.

Let’s not forget to mention the horrific reality of human trafficking, considered by the FBI to be one of the fastest growing dimensions of organized crime.  Women and children are the primary victims of this terrible scourge.

And recent data has shown that all age groups from as young as 10 years old have seen marked increases in suicide.

The point that my book makes is that this dreary decline in the quality of life for American children comes at a time when American culture according to Pew research is more secular and less Christian than at any other time in history.  This no accident as I argue in my book.

But this is a fact that belies the theories and expectation of many intellectuals, Steven Pinker and the New Atheists among them.

But secularization has brought us broken families and these have produced broken children.  Christianity is not poisoning our children. Secularization is.  And the only solution is to reverse the trend to secularization that appears to be irreversible. JG [add links for evidence on war on women] also whybrow.