Taking back our lives.

• Author: Hagelin, Rebecca
• Position: Life in America - On youth and pornography - Essay

WE SET OUT with six teenagers in our 15-passenger van on a 2,000-mile vacation. We always take other kids along with our own three when we go on our legendary Hagelin road trips. This time we were heading south from Virginia to visit Disney World and the beautiful Florida Gulf Coast beaches.

Barreling down I-95, the roadside was filled with tacky billboards screaming, "Topless! We Dare! We Bare!" advertising the many such bars that now dot the countryside. There was no escape from them, mile after mile. After a few hours we pulled into a gas station that had an ice cream counter. I left the teens to order and made a quick trip to the ladies room. When I returned to pay the bill, there were the two girls, standing at the register devouring their ice cream right beside a product called "Horniest Goat Weed: sex stimulant pills for men and women." So, a kid cannot even get a scoop of ice cream without being assaulted by a sexual message? I waved them away while I paid the bill, only to turn around and find them standing by a magazine rack filled with pornography.

Down the road we stopped at a Burger King for dinner--a safe place, at last, or at least I thought it would be an opportunity to just relax with the kids while we munched on burgers and flies. We soon discovered that mounted in the comer was a television blaring the images and sounds of one of those made-for-TV movies, this particular scene featuring a naked man and woman bumping under the covers. So, a family cannot drive down the highway, get a scoop of ice cream, or even eat hamburgers, without being assaulted by garbage?

Everywhere we go, from the grocery store check-out stands with their tacky women's magazines, to the mall with windows filled with mannequins and photos of young women in their underwear, to the video store with ultraviolent and pornographic movies, to the sexually graphic books many public schools are using to "teach" our kids, our sensibilities are under attack. Tragically, though, the toxic culture that is poisoning the hearts and souls of our families is not just "out there." Oftentimes, the American home has become the sump for cultural sewage.

It used to be that the home was the nurturing oasis providing relief from outside dangers, that a parent's greatest worry was looking out for the guy in the trench coat lurking in the shadows at the edge of the school playground. Well, that guy in the trench coat now is in our homes. If you do not believe me, log on to the Internet. According to the London School of Economics, nine out of 10 children who go online, usually to do homework, will stumble across hard-core pornography--and then there is the intentional porn consumption by kids. Oh, children might pass around a pornographic web address at school, but it is in the safety of their own homes--often in their own...