Kerby Anderson
We are facing a significant mental health crisis with our children and young adults. Elizabeth Fisher Good persuasively argues that we can be “Protecting our Kids’ Mental Health by Protecting their Sexual Health.” The stress, anxiety, and depression they exhibit are due to more than a lack of personal connection.
She warns, “Our children are being targeted online like never before by those who only seek to use and abuse them.” She explains, “Predators pose as peers on their favorite social media apps or online gaming chatrooms, forming what feels like a real connection to our lonely and disconnected kids seeking affirmation and acceptance.”
She also explains the way these traffickers use established grooming techniques. “They’ll ask for innocent-sounding photos at first, pushing for more and more each time until suddenly our kids are now under the control of this person and feel they have no one to turn to for help.”
The statistics from the Internet are overwhelming. The best estimates are that probably half a million predators are online every day. That suggests that about one in nine children will receive an online sexual solicitation. And once predators have secured a sexual image of a child, they can digitally manipulate it. This is referred to as child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
One article from Psychology Today on “The Long-Lasting Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse,” explains that it doesn’t seem to matter whether the abuse is physical or virtual. The long-term impact is anxiety, depression, PTSD, personality disorders, and eating disorders. I might also point out that the consequences may take years to develop.
We are rightly concerned with the mental health issues facing children and young adults. To protect their mental health, we must also protect their sexual health.

Kerby Anderson
Back in the early 1970s, John Lennon wrote the song “Imagine” which was his vision of a future of global harmony. Jim Geraghty recently wrote about the culture war and corporate America. He encouraged us to imagine a future where businesses weren’t trying to be woke but instead catered to the needs of their consumers.
What brought about his comments was a headline in New York magazine that lamented that after the fiascos of Bud Light and Target, we were now entering a new era corporate caution. But he doesn’t see (nor do I see) any evidence of corporate caution. Here are a few things he thought we should imagine.
“Imagine a beer company that just wanted to make good beer and sell it to you. Imagine if that company wanted to sell beer to everyone but didn’t feel that its job was to make you more accepting of transgender individuals.”
“Imagine an everything store like Target that wanted everyone to shop there, but that had the good sense to realize that partnering with a brand that had ‘Satanist-inspired merchandise’ was not the way to win over shoppers in a country that is still roughly two-thirds Christian.”
“Imagine a sports team that declared everyone was welcome but didn’t formally and publicly roll out the welcome mat for the quasi-pornographic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
He provides other examples, but you get the idea. It seems like every major company feels the need to lecture us about social, political, and cultural issues. In previous commentaries, I have recommended that companies stay out of the culture wars. Unfortunately, there are just enough progressive social warriors in some of these companies that they just cannot help themselves and eventually alienate half of their customer base.
I would love to imagine a world where corporations avoid lecturing us and merely produce goods and services. But I’m afraid they can’t imagine such a world.