UViews September
Ha! I've out-rushed Rush Limbaugh. Don't you just know his next book was going to be entitled, "What It All Boils Down To"?
What it all boils down to is that "love and sex" are the dividing line between good and evil. If our motivation for and practice of love and sexuality are centered on God, we are on the side of goodness. If our motivation for and practice of love and sexuality are centered on ourselves, we are on the side of evil. This is because, spiritually and physically, love is the root of life and lineage, the root of culture and civilization. Human beings became very confused at the beginning, and therefore this reality of the dividing line between good and evil has been obscured for millennia.
In the Garden of Eden, it was simple. "Do not eat the fruit", God commanded man and woman, meaning the fruit of love and sex. Adam and Eve, beguiled in part by the interference of a misguided archangel named Lucifer, came up with all kinds of reasons and motivations to disregard this commandment of God. The result was that they initiated their conjugal relationship prematurely. Frivilous as this might sound to today's ears, this action placed them personally, irrevocably on the side of evil. As a result they fell into total ignorance. They couldn't even raise their own family to stay together. Murder, rape, pillage, it all started there.
But there was lots of geography to explore, and humankind divided into tribes wandering across continents, and for millennia our ancestors struggled were over possession of land and populations. Those struggles ended with the close of the second World War, when ideology emerged as the battleground. Christians had come a 2,000 year course, realizing many truths and ideals. They were on the verge of readiness to find out what everything boils down to. This is when the ideological war began, full-swing. Who is going to define truth? What is right and wrong? What is the foundation for the creation of one world?
Left and Right
The leading contenders for dominance have risen and fallen in rapid succession. Marxism taught that history is determined by material forces which congeal in the economy. Political scientists believed that history is shaped by those who can manipulate men and armies based upon the quest for power. Modernizers taught that the scientists and engineers would rule the future. Now race and gender are the leading contenders for explaining why things are the way they are. These too will fall away, revealing the final inalterable fact: love and sex, and their immediate familial repercussions, determine the course of history. This is the battlefield of the cultural war.
On the one side: the family and its attendant values of fidelity, stability, loyalty, compassion, commitment, sacrifice, nurture, discipline, responsibility, etc. On the other side: the non-family and its attendant values of self-expression, self-fulfillment, selfishness, individualism, infidelity, instability, disloyalty, betrayal, irresponsibility, promiscuity, profligacy, abandonment, etc. On the one hand, exalting the grandfather and grandmother, the father, the mother, the husband and wife, the brother and sister, the child. On the other hand, exalting the playboy, the seductress, the . . . that's about it, folks. The free-sex social model has two roles: the playboy and the seductress. Oh yes, and their victims: the seduced and abandoned. Oh yes, and their other victims: the fetal tissue, otherwise known as children.
The sides are clear. The right stands for the family model. To believe in this model and practice it means to put responsibility for human lives in the hands of the parents, and trusting that the parents will do the job. This translates into policies which give us responsibility to take care of ourselves within the biological family and kinship structure. You make your bed, you sleep in it.
The left stands for the family model, too, but with a twist so great as to render the term meaningless, for in this view the government should fulfill the familial functions, in particular educating, feeding, clothing, housing, providing work. This is known otherwise as the welfare state, everywhere shown to be hazardous to human health. The government makes your bed, and everyone sleeps in it.
Thus, the valuation of the family, which emerges from one's view of love and sex, is the determinative factor separating the political left and right.
The Grateful Dead and Pop Government
So in this context, let's look again at sex education. But I'm going to get to it in a `round about way, by posing the question: why did the miserable, hospital death of rock'n'roll musician Jerry Garcia merit adulatory, front-page coverage by the New York Times? Why does my local public television station kick off its annual fund-raising drive with several hours of Garcia and his musical group the Grateful Dead? The reason is that this man and this group were the last artifact of the 60s' pop culture.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not your average red-necked bigot. I'm a very unusual red-necked bigot. I watched Phil Lesh drool through "Viola Lee Blues" in 1966, stood beside Pig Pen digging Chuck Berry at Winterland in 1967, and danced away many a cosmic aeon to the two-hour version of "Good Lovin" behind the stage at the Family Dog in 1969. With no attempt to hide my arrogance I can say, "been there, done that" and liked it to death. The problem can be stated in the words which no one listened to in John Lennon's conclusion to "God" (1971), to wit: "the dream is over".
I heard those words loud and clear, because it was true. But that was just when the great American capitalist machine was losing all its moral foundation (behind the smokescream of the anti-war saints of complaint). The dream brokers turned a foolish summer fling into a mass-marketed commodity, milked a generation dry and kept them wired into dope, sex and television, chanting, in effect: "it's still the 60s/make love not war/it's still the 60s/make love not war/it's still the 60s/make love not war . . ." We hear the echoes in the pop government run by today's White House.
Well, the 60s' "God" is singing about tears in heaven, and Garcia is literally dead. But the beat goes on in another artifact of the 60s: sex-education. Sex Ed is brought to you by the same folks who put Mr. Garcia on the front-pages, and is paid for by Uncle Sam (the invisible taxpayer), who, indeed, has been hiding out in a rock'n'roll band.
Sex and the Single Social Psychologist
Okay, I can tolerate my children being taught the plastic morality of secular humanism: don't smoke cigarettes, don't abuse alcohol, don't do marijuana and shoot heroin. Like, yeah, I mean, sure, I don't want them to smoke, drink and take drugs, so, hey, go ahead, knock yourself out. I've got no problem with the D.A.R.E. organization being subsidized millions of dollars trying to become a teenage status symbol, other than that it doesn't work.
But, is it really necessary that my thirteen-year old "be able to compare and contrast the structures and functions of the male and female reproductive systems"? "describe social changes that occur in adolescence"? "identify coping mechanisms for dealing with social and emotional difficulties during adolescence"?
Sex Ed, as described in my local middle school's "course expectations", is the funneling of the fruits of the last thirty years of social psychology dissertations into children's heads, with dogmatic kindness, in the context of softening their psyches with images of sexual organs and discussions of what to do with them. This could be viewed as insidious.
As I was growing up I had one hour of sex education. It stimulated a burning question for me: "how does the sperm get to the egg"? It must have for millions of other 12 year olds, because the curriculum now includes "the process of fertilization". So now we have kids waking up at night and walking in on their parents . . . "Gee, dad, are you and mom taking part in the process of fertilization?"
Or, better still, the answer to "where did I come from?" is, "Well, Johnny, you were the result of a process of fertilization. Your mom and I were responding to the onset of certain developing hormonal mechanisms while coping with the usual social and emotional dynamics attendant to adolescence, and after deliberating on it for about ten minutes while her parents were away, your mom got fertilized!"
I try to point out how ludicrous this is in order to shed light on its results: more teen pregnancy, more violence against women, more drug abuse, more poverty, more suicide . . . nothing good, nothing good at all has come out of sex education. Are people more "adjusted" now than thirty years ago? Are they "enjoying" sex more? Do they have less "hang-ups"? Is racism being overcome? Is poverty being eliminated? Has our society produced any great works of art? any great philosophical statements? any great ANYTHING?
And I'm sorry, but great machines [computers, jets, phones] do not cut the mustard. They really are the products of nerds, a few of whom have become rich and famous, but from the point of view of cultural enrichment, it is nerdsville.
Two and a Half Arguments for Sex Education, and Why They Don't Work
Argument One: Sex education is just teaching facts; the parents teach the values.
Answer A: Let's presume it is true that sex ed just teaches facts. Treating the human body, in particular human sexuality, as just a biological fact is to divorce it from reality so radically as to undermine the meaning of sexuality and humanness. I've written on this elsewhere, so I won't pursue it.
Answer B: There is no separating facts and values. The facts you teach are selected according to your values. Someone in the 50s or 60s suddenly applied a new value system (new in modern history) which legitimated sex being a subject taught children in schools. Such a premise is justified only by a secular humanist value system which denies God. This ideology sees all values (except its own) as being relative to cultural conditioning.
Argument Two: Okay, we do teach values, but they are very good ones, such as mutual respect, being happy with yourself, and communicating openly and honestly. Let's translate that:
Mutual respect = homosexuality and bi-sexuality are as good as heterosexuality.
Being happy with yourself = 10% of children should have an environment in which they can feel proud to affirm their homosexual desires. The rest should have an environment in which they can feel proud to affirm their heterosexual and auto-erotic desires.
Communicating openly and honestly = the teacher and school psychologist should know everything about the child's thoughts having to do with sex.
Am I exaggerating? I hope so, but I fear not. October, 1995, is officially declared Homsexuality/Lesbian History Month by the NEA (National Education Association-the teachers' union-the biggest union in the country). By a two-thirds vote they recommended that all public schools promote homosexuality during October. (And you can be sure it is their friends who are producing the curricula, posters, calendars, etc. etc. for the schools to buy with your tax dollars.)
Argument Three: Without sex ed, our society's sexual degeneracy would be much worse.
Answer: To answer this is a delicious temptation I must forego for lack of space. But consider one point: This argument presupposes that in the 50s, when sex ed was being thought out and first introduced, there was an enormous collapse of sexual morality taking place, and the inventors of sex ed were mobilizing resources to stop it. However, this is not the case. The collapse came after the introduction of sex ed.
I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that no one promoted sex ed in the 50s as a way to curb sexual immorality. They promoted it as a way to take the burden off parents and to provide children more clear information, so that their attitudes about sex would be more informed and "healthy". I'll admit I'm not well-read in this area, so I'm more than willing to be corrected. But I'll bet that it was only after the 60s that sex educators started making the claim that without sex ed the decline would be much worse.
Here is the question to ask your local public school sex educator: is their curriculum "directive" or "non-directive"? "Directive" methods are far more effective than "non-directive" in terms of promoting sexual purity. One good such curriculum is called "Facing Reality".
"Non-directive" or "psychological" methods just give the children all the "value-free" options and a free condom. And concerning "prevention" education about condoms, ask if the curriculum informs the students of the failure-rate of condoms (about 15% at best).
I recently received mailings from the Concerned Women of America (Beverly LaHaye) and Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly) about sex ed. It is rare one recommends a mailing, but these were eye-opening.