Did you know that you vote for or against human happiness, happy marriages, and families pretty much every day? Are you aware of how much influence you have in our society? Do you realize that your vote counts?

But, wait, how do we vote for happy marriages?

To explain, let me share with you how I learned about how people vote in our society.

I was on a plane heading to a business conference a year and a half ago and I was lucky to meet a very nice, open, and intelligent man. He was married and had some children. As we spoke, it became clear as day that he was pro-marriage and family.

For some reason, our discussion touched on pornography and he openly shared that he was very attracted to it. Then he told me he’d done some research on what people tend to do after they view pornography, and none of it was positive. He didn’t want to experience the consequences that pornography-viewing brought into his life even though he enjoyed the in-the-moment experience of viewing pornographic pictures. Here’s a paraphrase of how he concluded:

“So even though I ‘like’ pornographic pictures, I don’t ‘consume’ pornography because I realize that when I do

  1. I vote for more pornography to be produced
  2. I vote for the consequences in my own life
  3. I support others participating in pornography
  4. I support others experiencing the consequences in their lives, and
  5. I support people being affected by those negative experiences, too (wives, children, employers, etc.)”

That stuck with me. What I pay attention to and consume, in essence, I “vote” for more of.

A marketing expert and friend of mine said about headlines, “Sadly, the reality is, if it bleeds, it leads,” meaning, if the headline makes people feel an intense negative response (like shock, fear, or anger), they’ll read it! Isn’t that a little backwards? Why aren’t we supporting things that we want more of, like TV shows and movies that portray happy marriages and families, magazines that celebrate truly healthy and happy people, and reading books that pointedly don’t include violence?

We live in a marketplace that produces what we consume (or vote for), and anything you consume, it produces more of.

So, how do you vote? Are the things you surround yourself with for or against health, wholeness, positive relationships, marriage, and family?

YOUR VOTE COUNTS!

 

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