Ballard - Let Our Voices Be Heard - October 2003

Elder Ballard speaks about the negative impact of media on our families and society.  He starts by saying that television, music, and media services are made to entice and excite us but often have immoral and negative messages within them.  He says that Church leaders need to speak out against these things as they are distructive to the family unit.

• Church leaders have the responsibility to speak out on moral issues and to counsel individuals and families. The family is the basic unit of society; it is the basic unit of eternity. Thus, when forces threaten the family, Church leaders must respond.

He talks about the importance of family in our lives and in eternity.

• The family is at the heart of Heavenly Father’s plan because we are all part of His family and because mortality is our opportunity to form our own families and to assume the role of parents. It is within our families that we learn unconditional love, which can come to us and draw us very close to God’s love. It is within families that values are taught and character is built. Father and mother are callings from which we will never be released, and there is no more important stewardship than the responsibility we have for God’s spirit children who come into our families.

The media can devastate our families and pull our children away from good choices and moral lives.  We need to be careful what content is being brought into our homes and much of what the media offers is not uplifting and positive.

• If we do not make good choices, the media can devastate our families and pull our children away from the narrow gospel path. In the virtual reality and the perceived reality of large and small screens, family-destructive viewpoints and behavior are regularly portrayed as pleasurable, as stylish, as exciting, and as normal. Often media’s most devastating attacks on family are not direct or frontal or openly immoral. Intelligent evil is too cunning for that, knowing that most people still profess belief in family and in traditional values. Rather the attacks are subtle and amoral—issues of right and wrong don’t even come up. Immorality and sexual innuendo are everywhere, causing some to believe that because everyone is doing it, it must be all right. This pernicious evil is not out in the street somewhere; it is coming right into our homes, right into the heart of our families.

He issues a call to action for all church members.

• The time has come when members of the Church need to speak out and join with the many other concerned people in opposition to the offensive, destructive, and mean-spirited media influence that is sweeping over the earth.

Elder Ballard uses some humor to get his point across.  He says that the adversary doesn't attack us directly as it would be so obvious.  Instead he uses subtle attacks that seem harmless until we don't recognize how far we have strayed from the right places in our lives.

• Let me say again that the family is the main target of evil’s attack and must therefore be the main point of our protection and defense. As I said once before, when you stop and think about it from a diabolically tactical point of view, fighting the family makes sense to Satan. When he wants to disrupt the work of the Lord, he doesn’t poison the world’s peanut butter supply, thus bringing the Church’s missionary system to its collective knees. He doesn’t send a plague of laryngitis to afflict the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He doesn’t legislate against green Jell-O and casseroles. When evil wants to strike out and disrupt the essence of God’s work, it attacks the family. It does so by attempting to disregard the law of chastity, to confuse gender, to desensitize violence, to make crude and blasphemous language the norm, and to make immoral and deviant behavior seem like the rule rather than the exception.

Elder Ballard concludes with specific things we can do as parents to help and strengthen our families from the influence of the media.

• Let me conclude with seven things that every parent can do to minimize the negative effect media can have on our families:
  • 1. We need to hold family councils and decide what our media standards are going to be.
    
  • 2. We need to spend enough quality time with our children that we are consistently the main influence in their lives, not the media or any peer group.
    
  • 3. We need to make good media choices ourselves and set good examples for our children.
  • 4. We need to limit the amount of time our children watch TV or play video games or use the Internet each day. Virtual reality must not become their reality.
  • 5. We need to use Internet filters and TV programming locks to prevent our children from “chancing upon” things they should not see.
  • 6. We need to have TVs and computers in a much-used common room in the home, not in a bedroom or a private place.
  • 7. We need to take time to watch appropriate media with our children and discuss with them how to make choices that will uplift and build rather than degrade and destroy.
    

I love it when conference talks give us specific things we can do to be better.  Elder Ballard's 7 steps offer us a checklist of things to consider, things to take action on, and things to reflect on how we are doing in managing our families.  I appreciate the idea that Satan doesn't make big attacks on us as we would probably know these things are not right.  Instead he uses small little steps that are often unrecognizable.  My challenge is to identify those things that are taking me from the truth and remove those from my life.  Elder Ballard gives me some things to consider in my life that will help me reflect where my life and commitments are based.