What’s Wrong with the World

Sex education is neutral on questions of sex among minors in the same way that NRA gun safety courses are "neutral" on questions of private gun ownership.

That's a very good analogy. Except I hope that NRA has never even claimed to be neutral on the question of whether or not it's *immoral* to own guns.

Great post Lydia. This remind me of a disturbing conversation I recently had with a colleague and friend of mine here in Chicago. We were discussing this topic in relation to our own treatment of the subject with our eldest daughters (his daughter is 12, mine is 13). What was disturbing to me was his attitude, which I suspect was picked up in liberal public school environments (and not counter-acted by serious reflection on timeless moral Christian truths): he essentially told me he would teach his daughter that sex and especially pre-marital sex was "perfectly normal and natural part of life" and therefore he wanted his daughter to be aware of birth control and how to protect herself from disease (how depressing!)

I also remember how surprised and how naive he thought I was to be teaching my daughter to wait to have sex until marriage -- he basically thought I was a fool and that she would never listen to me. I remember I told him that I might be foolish but at least I was going to teach my girls the Truth -- they will not be told lies without their father getting in the way.

People out there have some really disturbing attitudes.

And those attitudes are really, really, quite commonplace. That cat is out of the bag once it is considered acceptable to have sexual relations outside of wedlock.

The only thing to do is what you are doing: stand against it, regardless of how far gone we are. And maybe find some way to get away from the creeps who believe those kinds of things.

People like the "health teacher" mentioned in the student's email are just the usefully idiotic shock troops for Planned Parenthood. I was going to put up a link to IPPF's Young People's Guide to Sexual Rights - which seems to me to have as its aim the abolition of an age of consent - but wasn't sure it would be acceptable here. I hesitate because reading the thing almost made me sick.

I also have no idea how to turn the tide in this battle.

Lydia,

Yes, the difference is one of basic honesty. The NRA doesn't bother insulting the intelligence of the average person with laughable claims of "neutrality," and whenever the suggestion is ever made of offering gun safety courses--for teachers, or young people, or whatever--the left experiences a sudden onrush of common sense and screams that of course such training normalizes gun ownership in the mind of the person receiving it, and of course it is premised on the idea that making use of guns is at least morally neutral.

In fact liberals usually have the sensitivity of the princess and the pea when it comes to the "messages" or "narratives" supposedly being delivered by this or that material. They are capable of squinting until their eyes pop out looking for secretly racist/sexist/nationalist/heteronormative/etc. codes imbedded in educational material. But they are conveniently insouciant about the openly propagandistic character of Hollywood scriptwriting, "diversity" casting, and so forth.

The bottom line in all of this is that professional liberals who make such claims as "Sex education does not encourage sexual activity" are knowing liars, and have been lying from the beginning. If you were to drag this particular specimen in front of a committee, she would fervently deny having made such statements, would tow the company line that sex education in her class is delivered without any suggestion that sex is to be accepted or encouraged among teens, etc. She would then bitterly complain about those right-wing kooks in the faculty lounge--either in a fog of double-think, or in resentment of being constrained to lie by those jerk conservative parents who refuse to get with the program.

I've seen this kind of leftist hypocrisy and agenda-mongering up close in academia too many times to retain any sense of innocence about these people.

What do you do as a parent if your child wants to have a dating relationship with someone who has previously engaged in casual sex?

Truth, I don't think the question as you've stated it really contains enough information to give a sensible answer. How old are the two young people, what is the prospective date's current disposition on the issue, how do I know him or her, what is my child's attitude about it, how do I have that kind of information to begin with, etc., etc. Of course I'd like to be able to just say "I would forbid it," which is my default answer on pretty much everything, but there's no way to know that's reasonable without a lot more context to work with.

This discussion reminds me of one of those stupid liberal bumper sticker slogans, that backfires when you give it a moment's thought: "Saying sex education increases teen pregnancy is like saying driver's ed increases car accidents."

Beside every other idiocy embedded in such an analogy, there's the fact that it implicitly acknowledges the common-sense argument that the point of sex education is to get people ready to engage in it right now. We don't give driver's ed to people unless we are planning to put them behind the wheel of a car, after all, and it would be weird in the extreme to tell a 15-year-old permit seeker that we did not intend to convey, by all these preparatory exercises, that we really do intend to allow him to drive. We're not encouraging him to drive, oh no. I mean, where would he get that crazy idea?

Again, this is all very elementary and everybody, deep down, knows the score. No one who is truly serious about discouraging sex among teens, or who still takes such things as paternal honor seriously, is to be found among the ranks of those eagerly promoting sex education, particularly of the "here's how to use a prophylactic" variety, in the schools.

I've been lucky enough not to see that bumper sticker, but you're right, Sage, it's obviously a ridiculous analogy.

And here we come up against another question: How many Christian parents have accepted the legitimacy of school-based sex education at all? Or another question: How many Christian schools use some kind of curriculum to teach at least teens or even middle-schoolers about, say, methods of birth control? I realize sex ed gets _way_ worse than teaching methods of birth control, but I still have a queasy feeling that we have both Protestant and Catholic Christian schools out there who have capitulated long since on what we might call Stage 1 or Stage 2 school-based sex ed. (Let's say that Stage 1 is that a teacher teaches minors the mechanics of at least heterosexual intercourse and reproduction and answers their questions, with a lot of questions arising as to what that teacher's attitudes are about such things and what will be communicated about morality. Stage 2 is that a teacher teaches methods of contraception and some kind of "safe sex" or "safer sex" material. Stages 3 and higher include the sort of stuff from Planned Parenthood and co. which Bill thought of linking.)

I would be willing to bet money that in Canada, where public funding for Christian schools is the norm, they are _required_ at least to do formalized Stage 2 sex ed. And as you say, Sage, this is like driver's ed. What is this all about if it isn't even going to be relevant to the recipients for years to come?

Gun safety and driver's ed aren't perfectly analogous to sex ed, since while you might have to drive a car or use a gun in an emergency, it's hard to fathom an emergency where the having of sex is the decisive action needed. But they do have a similar overall rationale, you don't have to do this thing, but if you decide to, here is what you need to know. And they will decide to. Those committed to chastity have never been the majority.

Sex ed opponents usually come not from a position that sex education is something best left for the parents, but rather that it is best left for the parents so that they can keep the kids ignorant and under wraps. It's not very compelling, to say the least, any more so than the liberal objections to gun safety are. Any program designed around tricking people into behaving by keeping them ignorant is doomed to failure.

so that they can keep the kids ignorant and under wraps...
designed around tricking people into behaving by keeping them ignorant

Use loaded, biased language much, Matt?

Hey, I have a great idea. Let's refer to today's sex ed programs as designed around tricking kids into having more premarital sex by purveying disinformation about the likely psychological and physical consequences of promiscuity. Frankly, Matt, that would have more to be said for it than your above characterization of social conservatives' position concerning parents, childhood innocence and latency, and sex ed.

Perhaps if we object to offering classes in every public school called, "Bomb safety: How to make and detonate bombs without getting hurt yourself" we are attempting to trick people into behaving by keeping them ignorant and under wraps.

Thousands of years of human history, in which the young were educated in sexual matters at the time and manner of their parents' choosing, rather than by official state intervention effected by loathsome left-wing libertines, was always doomed to failure, was it Matt? When was this catastrophic failure of ignorance concerning the birds and the bees going to befall us, exactly?

Also, the choice of phrase "under wraps" is interesting, if vague. If it can be taken to mean "under the parents' authority," and/or "not having sex," then I'm not sure what there is not to like about it. If those things are hateful to you, then that affirms the entire point of Lydia's post.

In general, I find internet combox remarks to be much more forthcoming about the real intentions and attitudes of promoters of these kinds of classes than the evasive, dishonest, soothing public relations that surround them.

Let's refer to today's sex ed programs as designed around tricking kids into having more premarital sex by purveying disinformation about the likely psychological and physical consequences of promiscuity.

I think there's more than a little truth to this. There's no doubt that removing sex ed from a religious context is one of the motivations at work here.

"Bomb safety: How to make and detonate bombs without getting hurt yourself"

Do you think sex is comparable to the making and setting off of bombs? These analogies do nothing for your side.

When was this catastrophic failure of ignorance concerning the birds and the bees going to befall us, exactly?

Will the 1960's do? But honestly, the minute cheap and reliable contraception was developed, it was over for the old ways.

Ehh, the old contraception canard is kind of BS to me. Coitus interuptus is fairly ancient, and so is the barrier method.

Economics and urbanization is the key.

There could be legitimate times and places to make and use bombs. Presumably certain military experts have to know about bomb safety. But teaching about making bombs in the schools would imply that everybody should be doing it, which we don't want to teach. So, yeah, Matt, I think it's a pretty good analogy, actually. Setting off a bomb at a public event is intrinsically wrong, but making and setting off a bomb isn't intrinsically wrong at every time and in every place (e.g., against a true military target), unless one is a pacifist. Similarly, having sex outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong, but sex isn't always intrinsically wrong. However, teaching all kids about "safe sex" implies that it's completely normal for those very kids to be having sex. Similarly, sex is the kind of thing that has enormous implications and should not be engaged in lightly but only under specific circumstances. One could even say that these implications are emotionally and socially explosive, but teaching about it globally as we have trivializes it. So, again, yes, for many reasons I think the analogy actually works pretty well.

They said ad nauseam that they were pressing for teaching kids "safe sex" only because "the kids are going to do it anyway," but in actuality, they themselves believed quite definitely that there was nothing really wrong with the kids' doing it, that sexual activity by (at least) teens, if not younger kids, among themselves is a perfectly normal and natural part of life.

We should thank them for making argument for providing gun safety courses to inner city minority minors.

(Even if we don't agree with their premise as it applies to sex)

Yes, Lydia, we get all that, but sex isn't like making bombs in every respect, don't you know. Because it was obvious that's what you meant.

Sometimes people just engage in a rhetorical dodge like Matt's because they assume it will be way too tiresome to spell out in what ways an analogy is relevant. You've got more patience than I have with that sort of thing.

You think "the 1960's," whatever that's supposed to mean, were a result of the absence of explicit sex education in the schools? I would love to see you defend that proposition at some length.

but rather that it is best left for the parents so that they can keep the kids ignorant and under wraps.

Honestly, if you cannot figure out how to put on a condom just by looking at it and holding it, you have reproductive prospects similar to a Panda in captivity as it is...

Thanks, Sage. I'm actually an extremely impatient person, but in my family I am surrounded by chess players, so when I blog I usually have "prepared my openings" by trying to imagine what somebody is going to respond. At that point, it's almost irresistible to trot out one's prepared line when somebody says what one anticipated.

I think the smoking analogy is better: we know that teens are going to smoke anyways, so we should provide them with low tar and nicotine cigarettes to substitute for their Camels and Luckies. If they're going to do it they should do it as safely as possible.

But they do have a similar overall rationale, you don't have to do this thing, but if you decide to, here is what you need to know. And they will decide to. Those committed to chastity have never been the majority.

That's not actually true. At times and places in history, there have been communities where "most" people were committed to chastity. The fact that you cannot even IMAGINE that as true goes a long way to suggest where the problem lies.

Even in today's world, it is USUALLY true that sex ed itself is actively pushed on significant numbers of people who would rather - all other things being equal - not be pushed into accepting this new next step of information just yet can we go a little slower here wait a little longer? If you take the sum total of all of the children for all of the steps in which their face is mashed up against something they might rather wait a little while longer before having to consider, it works out to a LOT. Perhaps more so in children not subject to dozens of hours of TV and radio every week. But no, sex ed is, like sex in the libertine's "paradise", must be all the time, everywhere, in everyone's faces whether they like it or not, with nary a nod to even the remotest iota of sense that maybe some of this material might be emotionally or psychologically troublesome for a child.

The response to the bomb question just cements the point. "military experts", seriously? I don't hold people too accountable for these off-the-cuff analogies, since we all do it sometimes, but they really are terrible and should be avoided.

Incidentally, the bomb analogy makes the left's point vis-a-vis gun safety classes for them, being much more appropriate for that context. Good job on that. Also note that the left has totally failed on gun control.

But it isn't hard to see that at no time is it appropriate to build and set off a bomb in civil society, unless it is something like a science experiment. And in those cases, people absolutely should be informed of the necessary safety precautions, so the analogy falls flat once again.

You think sex is evil outside of marriage, but hardly anyone else outside of the conservative Christian minority believes this, so this is not sufficient grounds for removing sex ed entirely. It would be a reason to not have to subject your own kids to it, on the grounds of respecting cultural differences.

You think "the 1960's," whatever that's supposed to mean, were a result of the absence of explicit sex education in the schools?

"Traditional" social norms on sex functioned in large part because the consequences of sex were immediate and obvious, in the form of pregnancy or perhaps disease. Fear is a great motivator. Ubiquitous and reliable contraception and other medical advances have completely destroyed this paradigm. So what people did for "thousands of years" is almost entirely irrelevant to our current situation.

I think the smoking analogy is better

The problem with the smoking analogy is that smoking a cigarette occasionally is really no big deal and won't do you any harm, whereas conservative christians argue that any and all sex outside of marriage is evil. So the way to smoke "safely" is to do it in moderation, something that IMO is entirely sensible to teach kids, but there is no analogous concept for sex in the conservative christian worldview. On the other hand, society has developed a sizable number of smoking puritans recently, so this one may be of use after all.

At times and places in history, there have been communities where "most" people were committed to chastity.

Self-selecting groups aren't really what I'm talking about.

Tony,

This comment is wise: "But no, sex ed is, like sex in the libertine's "paradise", must be all the time, everywhere, in everyone's faces whether they like it or not, with nary a nod to even the remotest iota of sense that maybe some of this material might be emotionally or psychologically troublesome for a child."

I really do think there is a strong psychological element to all of this involving projection -- I quite doubt these libertines are enjoying themselves all that much (every study I've seen suggests married people enjoy each other just fine thank you very much).

You think sex is evil outside of marriage, but hardly anyone else outside of the conservative Christian minority believes this, so this is not sufficient grounds for removing sex ed entirely.

Ah, bandwagon fallacy, where would we be without thee? No, Matt: The idea that sex outside of marriage is wrong is not just some kind of obscure, black-box, mysterious religious teaching. It is available to all mankind by the natural light. Moreover, what "hardly anyone believes" in 2013 is hardly a measure of whether or not this is true. When sex ed first got started, _plenty_ of non-Christians were uncomfortable with it, seeing it as normalizing premarital sex and sex by minors. Even if they didn't buy the entirety of traditional sexual ethics (and they didn't have to be Christians even to go that far), they had a sense that this kind of widespread normalization would encourage and increase the early onset of sexual activity and would be bad for society. Which was true, because as I said in the post, sex education is not neutral.

Moreover, moreover, these are kids, minors. Even yet it is the legal position of almost every jurisdiction in this country that at least some of those receiving this detailed instruction cannot even give consent to sexual intercourse. The sexualization of children is something that people worry about. Just how happy are most _non-Christian_ people about the evolution of a Disney princess to the point where she's doing one level of public lewd dance when she's seventeen and a worse level when she's just a few years older? Answer: Not very happy. The fact is that "most people" have a confused jumble of ideas that include being pretty darned uncomfortable with the idea of their fifteen-year-olds having sex. But at the same time, because they no longer have any kind of coherent and consistent concept of sexual morality, they don't know how to defend these intuitive feelings, so they get chivvied into allowing their kids to be given graphic, enabling, normalizing sex education from, oh, age eleven or twelve onwards. The present situation hardly amounts to a popular mandate from the non-religious, opposed only by narrow, culturally constrained, weirdo Christians.

The purely prudential case for removing education that normalizes sex by minors is itself well worth considering. Thomas Sowell doesn't argue against sex education in the schools by saying, "Thus sayeth the Lord." Nor does he need to.

Y'know, these talking points are really pretty shallow, Matt. They really are. I wish you no ill as an individual, but I'm afraid you're proving to be a pretty good exemplar of the kind of thinking and chatter I had in mind when I wrote the post.

I really don't get the argument that simply because people are going to have sex anyway might as well teach them to do it safely.

We might as well go, people are going to commit crimes and murder and steal anyway, why not teach them to do it as safely as possible, like, teach them to mug and kill in the most painless way possible, minimise injury or if they must kill, teach them to inflict instant death to minimise agony and suffering, etc.

"Minority minors," Mike T? What is this the 1950s? If white minors were in the same conditions they, ostensibly but I'm leaning towards verily, would act the same. Case in point, dumb rednecks. Correlation not causation, right? Unless you're saying that whites are somehow more reasonable than minors by nature. If so, then I'm going to pull the asians are smarter card. One stereotype for another :P Oh well. As far as I can see you are more than a blessing. God be with you and keep up the good work.

Threadjack much, Chris Lee?

Let's carry on with the discussion of sex education, people. I myself am very eager to hear Matt's reply to Lydia's quite sound observation that far more than a narrow remnant of traditional Christians condemn lawlessness sexuality and public lewdness. Why even the pope's old musical antagonist took to a UK newspaper recently to read Miss Cyrus a rather stern lecture.

Part of what's going on here, in my estimation, is that liberals are evidencing their usual weakness for euphemism. Chesterton perceived it long ago. Short words startle them while long words soothe them. Say to them, "all continuing public school students should receive rational lessons in sexual education," and they rock away like babies. Say to them, "girls should be encouraged in sluttiness and boys in smut" and they sit up sharply.

Consider all the elisions and lullabies that Matt tucks away in the following concatenation of euphemisms:

Ubiquitous and reliable contraception and other medical advances have completely destroyed [traditional sexuality].

Ubiquitous is not necessarily reliable, and uncomfortable class instruction will hardly prepare young people for the wild thrill that awaits them. The innocence of liberals is sometimes astounding; they really think that teachers showing teenagers how to apply a condom to a banana will tame the sexual urge, channel it into productive use.

The plain pulverizing fact is that "safe sex" is a contradiction in terms. No sex is safe. None. Human sexuality is an enormously powerful and unpredictable force. In many people is an almost constant force to agitate and preoccupy; in nearly all people it is, at least on occasion, a rather impressive dominator of the whole psyche at once. It has the potential to drive peaceable men to crimes of appalling fury; or rescue impulsive and reckless men by means of its true discipline into fullest expression.

Furthermore, safe sex (read: contracepted sex) remains, from the perspective of society, a biological impossibility. No birth control, even properly utilized, is perfectly effective at preventing what biology designs for human reproduction. Under pressure of teenage inexperience, or drunkenness (would Matt like to consult the numbers, say with college students, on how often fornication is preceded by heavy boozing?), or mere incapacity under the influence of a wildness set loose, contraception becomes a very iffy proposition. That "medical advances" permit us, quietly and surgically, to snuff out future generations when things go wrong, when hormones or human hands fail in their application, only conceals but never extirpates the common issue of healthy male-female couplings. I repeat: the common issue of healthy male-female sexuality is children, even when birth control is projected, expected and even attempted. One need consult no scriptural text to learn that. Young women soak their organs in concentrated hormones for years on end; then, down the line discovering a true sexual urge in its fullest sense, they flood themselves with different hormones. (Lately they have taken to demanding that everyone else be obliged by law to pay for these treatments; our robed masters have taken up that case.) But in event, the chemicals & euphemisms partially conceal but never destroy what human sexuality really is.

Safe sex-oriented sex ed tells lies about human sexuality. Damned lies. Science no less than philosophy can demonstrate this.

Thank you, Chris. You are precisely the sort of liberal I like to piss off with comments like that. Glad to see it worked on someone.

So the way to smoke "safely" is to do it in moderation, something that IMO is entirely sensible to teach kids, but there is no analogous concept for sex in the conservative christian worldview.

Matt, do you actually listen to people when they talk about how they got hooked on smoking? I know at least 2 smokers whose very first experience with it was so pleasant that telling them to do it "in moderation" would have been a hopeless waste of breath.

And...same with sex. If you took away all suggestions that teen sex has any moral problems, and take away social / parental / school / adult disapproval of teen sex, do you really think you are going to get teens engaging in sex in moderation? What have you been smoking?

Speaking of smoking strange weeds, I really had to laugh at this:

"Traditional" social norms on sex functioned in large part because the consequences of sex were immediate and obvious, in the form of pregnancy or perhaps disease.

Matt, I don't think that word "immediate" means what you think it means. If the consequences (a baby) really were immediate, then teens (and adults) would have a damn-all harder time fooling themselves into thinking a little fornication couldn't hurt anyone. No, teens have a hard enough time being rational about consequences that will land on them in a few days (homework - what homework?), much less consequences that will become obvious in a few MONTHS. Just look at all of the teen sex that goes on even though they have been told about "safe sex" but they ran out of condoms and can't be bothered to get more right now, or that the pill doesn't work as well when you are on certain medications and they go ahead anyway.

I think getting obscured in this whole discussion is that we have in Matt's comments confirmation of the title of Lydia's post. He heaps scorn on the idea of traditional sexual morality and explicitly connects "sex education" with the breakdown of disapprobation of premarital, or even just teen, sex. Which was Lydia's point. The left, as usual, has lied from the beginning to the public about what this is all about, and once discovered, their answer is the same as it always is:

Yeah, that's our agenda alright, and it's a good thing, too.

(For more, see: Panels, Death. See also Insurance Plans, Substandard. See also Immigration, Third World.)

I think getting obscured in this whole discussion is that we have in Matt's comments confirmation of the title of Lydia's post. He heaps scorn on the idea of traditional sexual morality and explicitly connects "sex education" with the breakdown of disapprobation of premarital, or even just teen, sex. Which was Lydia's point. The left, as usual, has lied from the beginning to the public about what this is all about, and once discovered, their answer is the same as it always is:

Yeah, that's our agenda alright, and it's a good thing, too.

(For more, see: Panels, Death. See also Insurance Plans, Substandard. See also Immigration, Third World.)

The left, as usual, has lied from the beginning to the public about what this is all about, and once discovered, their answer is the same as it always is:

Yeah, that's our agenda alright, and it's a good thing, too.

This reminds me of Dawn Eden's comment on feminist complaints about patriarchal "virgin/whore" complexes. She said she'd be believe such a thing existed if its proponents didn't have sympathies entirely on the side of the whore.