The Truth about Sex Education

Peter Hitchens is a well-known journalist, author, and cultural commentator from Great Britain. The following comments come from an interview with LifeSiteNews:

• "We find that despite the greater and greater extent of sex education in our society...the number of people becoming pregnant when they didn't want to continues to rise and the number of people contracting sexually transmitted diseases continues to rise." 

Why has this happened? Had the experts just been so wrong?

• “The problem with sex education,” he told me by phone, “is that the ostensible purpose for which it is advocated turns out not to be true. I did a sort of study a few years ago of the development of sex education in my own country, and what I found is that it's been justified really since the middle part of the Second World War, when of course there were a lot of venereal diseases, on the basis that if people were better educated about it, then it would reduce the amount of sexually transmitted disease and the amount of unwanted pregnancy. And yet if you watch the figures for both sexually transmitted disease and for unwanted pregnancy, and increasingly now for abortion, we find that despite the greater and greater extent of sex education in our society, more and more frankness about sex, and more and more pornography (which is also supposed to end repression), the number of people becoming pregnant when they didn't want to continues to rise and the number of people contracting sexually transmitted diseases continues to rise.” 

Not all Leftists are transparent about their intentions. However, some are:

• “It's said,” Hitchens noted, “that Gyorgy Lukas, who was commissar for education in the short-lived Bela Kun Soviet Government in Hungary in 1918, openly said that the purpose of sex education when he introduced it then - I think he was probably the first person to do so - was to debauch the minds and morals of religiously-brought up young women particularly. It seems to me to make a certain amount of sense…because the kinds of things that people are taught in sex education are disinhibiting things.”

Dis-inhibition seems to have been a powerful tool:

• “When I was in school no one ever mentioned masturbation. It would have been extremely bad manners to mention it anywhere, let alone for an adult teacher to talk to quite young children about it and about other sexual practices in class. The moment these things start being discussed, it disinhibits people, it takes restraints off them that previously were there. Now you may believe, and a lot of people do believe and have believed for many years, that these inhibitions are bad for us. That's a point of view, I don't happen to share it, and if you follow that belief as a parent, I suppose you're entitled to introduce your child to this sort of thing as early an age as you wish in a free country, but what bothers us in many cases [is that] parents don't realize what is being done in classrooms until after it's happened.”

According to Hitchens, Leftist politics intends to undermine parental influence:

  

• “There is politics in sex,” says Peter Hitchens. “Much of those politics are about…the family and the State. The state is increasingly hostile to the strong family, and the strong family is sustained by lifelong marriage and by a pretty stern and puritan attitude towards sexual relations—whereas the strong state benefits in many ways, as does modern commerce and the modern employer, from weak marriages and relaxed sexual relations. There's also the point that Aldous Huxley makes, which is that we are increasingly going to embrace our own enslavement in the pursuit of pleasure, which I believe actually the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm made...that there is absolutely no congruence in human history between sexual freedom and political freedom. Slaves have always been allowed to copulate, what they haven't been allowed to do is marry.”

How is unrestricted sex promoted? It promises freedom, both socially and psychologically. However, according to Hitchens, there is more evidence that it enslaves:

• “And this,” Hitchens continued, “is an extremely important point. There is no necessary connection between a society which is sexually free and sexually uninhibited, and a society that is politically free and has free speech and freedom of assembly, it doesn't necessarily follow at all. So we're all doing it with a very, very profound philosophical battle about the nature of society, and it needs to be conducted in a very serious fashion. The difficulty is in finding anyone to give you a hearing.” 

The Leftist agenda is still in favor of world revolution. However, it is now conducted in a slow, stealthful, and “peaceful” manner:

•  “The fundamental engine of left-wing activity, really since the 1960s, has not been to seize the post office and the barracks and the railway station, it's been to seize the television station and the newspaper and the university, and to obtain victory through capturing the minds of people, and also to alter society not through the nationalizing of railways, but through the nationalizing of childhood.”

The State has a poor record for overseeing the interests of children. For the State, they are merely pawns in a political game to be used to accomplish the dreams of ideologues. Understandably, it is the parents who love their children and want the best for them.

What evidence do the Leftists provide that they can create a better world? If they have it, they are keeping it a secret, as the world descends into chaos.

THE DEADLY CONSTRICTION OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

When reason fails to argue in your favor, there is always coercion. In The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, liberal democrat, Kirsten Powers, writes about the Left's methods:

• The illiberal left yearns for a world sanitized of information that offends them. So why not just tune out the views they don’t like? They can’t. They are authoritarians at heart; they know what Americans should think and what information they should consume. So they launch petitions to have particular views censored from newspapers. They try to get columnists fired for expressing the wrong views. The illiberal left has maniacally maneuvered to delegitimize the Fox News Channel, unable to abide the existence of one news network critical of the president. High- ranking White House officials were the face of this effort, telling anyone who would listen that Fox News was “not really a news station” and not “legitimate.” These top government officials were joined in their illiberal campaign by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America (MMFA), which enjoys the support of some of the Democratic Party’s top donors. 12 At one point, Media Matters’ CEO David Brock told Politico that the organization’s ninety- person staff and $10 million annual budget was dedicated to the purpose of waging “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” 13 against Fox News. A leaked MMFA memo for liberal donors detailed a strategy to destroy Fox that included plans to assemble opposition research on Fox News employees.

• The illiberal left hunts down heretics, dissidents, and run- of- the mill dissenters to not only silence them, but make examples of them for the rest of society. Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia... Those who oppose same- sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.”

Why does Powers term them "illiberal?"

• The illiberal left, on the other hand, believes that people who express ideological, philosophical, or political views that don’t line up with their preferences should be completely silenced. Instead of using persuasion and rhetoric to make a positive case for their causes and views, they work to delegitimize the person making the argument through character assassination, demonization, and dehumanizing tactics. These are the self- appointed overlords— activists, university administrators, journalists, and politicians— who have determined what views are acceptable to express. So, shut up— or else.

Sadly, these Leftists aren't a fringe element. According to Powers, they have great latitude to shape young, idealistic, but naive minds:

• On campuses there are speech codes, so- called “free speech zones,” and a host of “anti- discrimination” policies that discriminate against people who dissent from lefty groupthink. Christian and conservative groups have been denied official university status by student government organizations for holding views not in line with liberal dogma.

We might think that the universities and media have a vested interest in upholding the freedom of speech for all. However, myopically, they are convinced that, by depriving a voice to some, their voice will remain unbridled. 

This is what the proletariat masses, who met Lenin upon his return to Russia in 1917 with enthusiastic cries of "Power to the people; Power to the Soviets" thought. They had been promised that they would be in control and not the Tzars. However, Lenin had other ideas:

• One of the first moves of Lenin’s government was to ban all opposition press. When asked about freedom of speech Lenin answered: “Freedom of speech?! We are not going to commit suicide.” (Russiapedia) 

Powers is certainly not alone in her analysis:

• “This tainting and ostracism of sinners is the secret power of the leftist faith,” wrote David Horowitz in Progressives, Volume II of The Black Book of the American Left. “It is what keeps the faithful in line.” It is “part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean.” 

The reaction to Powers’ book by her fellow liberal leftists was predictable. Breitbart reports:

• Powers, a lifelong liberal and supporter of gay marriage, has suffered an avalanche of abuse from her side. She’s called a “bigot,” “homophobe,” “f-ckface,” and more. It is a classic Leftist tactic – take something the person did or said, lie about it, make it into a huge deal, and use it to discredit them. It is also a Leftist tradition to bury any independent thinkers on their side the moment they express disagreement.

How is it that the Left is able to get away with libel? There is little accountability from the media and the universities. Either these institutions are thug-sympathizers or they are afraid to stand up against the thugs. At best, they compromise their integrity and fail the public trust.