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I learned early in my teens the folly of smoking. An aunt caught me with a lit cheroot stuck to my bottom lip and proceeded immediately to impress on me the error of my way. “But all my friends do it,” I pleaded with that tough lady before she planted a couple of welts across my back with a leather strap.
“And if your friends jump off a cliff, will you join them?” she asked.
No discerning youngster will entertain the thought let alone answer with a silly rejoinder like, “Yes, I will.”
It struck me while reading a letter in the Samoa News that there’s another point to my aunt’s question. The first one, of course, is the foolishness of conformity. The second one is, knowing the consequence of foolishness, will I still jump?
Sadly (and I speak figuratively now), many of us will. Not because we are oblivious to the consequence of taking the jump, but for the sheer exhilaration, the temporary “high” (if you will) that the jump engenders. Does not the Bible teach that there are pleasures (albeit fleeting) in sin? Does it not also teach that after sin, comes death? One may think my aunt’s question unworthy of serious concern or the answer too obvious. But there lies the rub. It is the obvious that often trips us.
A case in point is safe-sex education. Is it safe?
If they mean anything, statistics tell the whole sordid story. But in spite of (or perhaps because of) the statistics, many continue to rally around this ill-conceived plan. I’ve heard it said many times that sex education reduces teenage pregnancy and eliminates sexually-transmitted diseases. The rationale goes: Every teenager will do it. So why not teach them safe-sex, give them condoms and let them have their way. Sex is natural after all. It is healthy. To the skeptic, there’s a twist to an old axe: This is the twenty-first century. Abstinence was then…teen sex is now!”
This last one commits what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—the wrongheaded argument that a present way of thinking is inherently superior to an old one.
Whichever side of the safe sex controversy one stands, the verdict is unavoidable. Sex education is a disaster. It has neither reduced teenage pregnancy nor controlled sexually-transmitted diseases. It has, for the most part, encouraged teen pregnancy and prostitution and such horrific acts as gang rape and abortion. Since the US government launched it as a solution to a national crisis, proponents and opponents alike have seen and read the devastating evidences. Still Congress, egged by special interest lobbyists, continued to pour millions of taxpayers’ dollars into it.
Today, we stand waist-deep in an epidemic. Sexually transmitted diseases run rampant. We have more cases of syphilis than any other time since the invention of penicillin. Gonorrhea is out of control with millions of new cases surfacing each year. In 1993, the US Centers for Disease Control reported that “…fifty-six million people in the United States now have a sexually transmitted virus, and they will suffer from it for the rest of their lives.” Even the horrendous and widespread effects of AIDS have not deterred government officials and school districts from promoting safe sex. In spite of what Planned Parenthood and some members of the SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the US) say, sex education fails as a deterrent and preventive measure. Ignoring the obvious, experts continue to pound into our children’s minds safe sex techniques—some of which are downright appalling. One curriculum idea encourages the use of a diaphragm (rubber contraceptive device for women) as a puppet, opening and closing the opening as a mouth and having it talk to children. Award-winning feminist playwright of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, couldn’t have devised a better technique.
Another strategy calls for young boys to say ‘vagina’ out loud and the girls to say ‘penis.’ At a training session for the ‘Michigan Model’ of health education, teachers are instructed to encourage students to see, feel, smell, and taste condoms. At a suburban high school in Massachusetts, tenth grade students are given a homework assignment to go home and masturbate. One curriculum suggests that students attend a safe sex dance party and dance to hot music with explicit messages (William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong).
The few examples may cause some discomfort among readers, but they are what our children in the US are exposed to—in many cases, without parental consent or knowledge.
Like every worldview that leaves out God, safe sex education strips our children of purpose and meaning. Pandering to our children’s “felt needs” it promotes half-truths: sex is not evil; if it feels good and you enjoy it, it is not wrong.
Certainly, sex (per se) is not evil. God invented it. But the same all-wise and all-knowing God ordained it to be enjoyed only in the bond of matrimony between man and woman. Christian author, Charles Colson, provides part of the reason: “[S]exuality and marriage center on who God made us to be—the type of creatures we are. We are not just a mind that resides in a body. We don’t use our body like a conveyance or tool for particular purposes. Mind and body compose a unity: They are one. Any sexual act presents a giving of the person—the whole person—to another… [T]he union of our bodies has a psychological and spiritual dimension whether or not we like it.”
I haven’t seen the Samoan documentaries on teenage pregnancy. But I understand that those involved in their making emphasized abstinence. To them, I say: “Thank you for taking an unpopular stance!” We live in a world where absolute truth is often mocked, discredited, or taken to task. More than ever, our children need (and, I’m certain, yearn for) Biblical counseling. At times, such counseling may require a little reinforcement—as my dear aunt so effectively did with me.
Author and Christian counselor, Dr. James Dobson, visited with incarcerated youths at a detention hall a few years ago. When he asked them if there was anything their parents could have done differently to help them, the vast majority replied: “We wish they had spanked us.”
No parent is perfect—even in the matter of sex. But to paraphrase a good friend: Truth is truth. And we shouldn’t allow our past sins and hypocrisy to stop us from seeking, living, and teaching it.
Is there such a thing as safe sex?
Absolutely! The Bible has the first and last word on it.
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Fa'afetai tele lava / Thank you
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