Never before, at least not in our generation, have the forces of evil been so blatant, so brazen, so aggressive as they are today. Things we dared not speak about in earlier times are now constantly projected into our living rooms. All sensitivity is cast aside as reporters and pundits speak with a disgusting plainness of things that can only stir curiosity and lead to evil.... The home is under siege. So many families are being destroyed.... Sisters, guard your children. They live in a world of evil. The forces are all about them.

Because of the importance of the family to the eternal plan of happiness, Satan makes a major effort to destroy the sanctity of the family, demean the importance of the role of men and women, encourage moral uncleanliness and violations of the sacred law of chastity, and to discourage parents from placing the bearing and rearing of children as one of their highest priorities.

To be unchaste, in the name of love, is to destroy something precious in order to celebrate its existence wrongly. When we lose our capacity to feel, it is because we have destroyed the taste buds of the soul.

Decide which decisions you only have to make once and then make them.... Decide right now. You can do that with morality, the Word of Wisdom, temple marriage, a mission, and with a whole list of other important principles of the gospel. Then you don’t have to keep fighting yourself every time a new challenge or opportunity comes up.

First, adults need to understand, and our children should be taught, that private choices are not private; they all have public consequences.

There is a popular notion that doing our own thing or doing what feels good is our own business and affects no one but us. The deadly scourges that are epidemic all over the world have flourished in the context of this popular notion. But this is simply not true.

All immoral behavior directly impacts society. Even innocent people are affected. Drug and alcohol abuse have public consequences, as do illegitimacy, pornography, and obscenity. The public cost in human life and tax dollars for these so-called private choices is enormous: poverty, crime, a less-educated work force, and mounting demands for government spending to fix problems that cannot be fixed by money. It simply is not true that our private conduct is our own business. Our society is the sum total of what millions of individuals do in their private lives. That sum total of private behavior has worldwide public consequences of enormous magnitude. There are no completely private choices.