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.

Abstinence Ed vs. Sexual-Expression Ed

We are entrenched in a vicious culture war, and the question of sexually seems to be at the front lines. While one side wants to retain traditional Judeo-Christian values, the other seems to want to sexualize the children. Therefore, everyone is training their cannons on sex-education. Should abstinence programs be promoted to reduce STDs and teen pregnancies or their opposite? However, a recent study has just added its voice to many others in favor of abstinence ed:

• Researchers observed more than 1,100 ninth graders in Georgia who used the Choosing the Best (CTB) curriculum in 2009-10. The abstinence-based curriculum delayed the onset of sexual activity.

According to the study’s authors:

• “Data demonstrated significant impact of CTB at the end of 9th grade on commitment to abstinence, pro-abstinence beliefs and attitudes, intentions to maintain abstinence, and lower onset of sexual intercourse, and at the beginning of 10th grade on pro-abstinence attitudes…abstinence from sexual activity until marriage is the best way to avoid teen pregnancy, disease, and possible negative emotional consequences, and is the best way to help students focus on academic and other future-oriented goals.”

• The study’s success reassured Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA). “This new study adds to 22 other peer reviewed studies showing SRA [Sexual Risk Avoidance] education has a positive impact on student sexual behavior,” she said. “This rigorous research design adds an important exclamation point to the efficacy of abstinence-centered education.”

The stakes are high for both sides of the conflict, and so politics often trumps truth and the welfare of the children:

 

• Meanwhile, researchers say the Obama administration stonewalled releasing another report that showed abstinence attitudes positively impact teens…“Their anti-abstinence position is just as political, if not more so, than the pro-abstinence position of conservatives,” [Peter] Sprigg [FRC] told LifeSiteNews. “The liberals often claim it is conservatives who are anti-science, but when the research and the science goes against their ideological position, they are very eager to suppress the findings.”

The power to suppress findings means that science and scholarship have become tools to be manipulated by the powerful. However, the findings in favor of abstinence education seem to have escaped the censor’s scissor:

• “Anyone who opposes SRA abstinence-centered education must be honest in their antagonism,” Huber stated. “They can no longer say that the approach ‘doesn’t work,’ but must admit that their opposition is simply an ideological distaste for programs that encourage teens to wait for sex.” 

However, will the elite now listen or will their “ideological distaste” lead them to “normalize” any form of child sexual expression, to their very obvious detriment?