Published February 19, 2005, on WorldNetDaily.com
Not to be outdone by the Bush administration’s proposed $38 million increase for abstinence education in fiscal year 2006, congressional Democrats are responding in the best way they know how – by proposing a fat budget of their own.
On Feb. 10, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., introduced the “Responsible Education About Life (REAL) Act,” which is meant to counter the president’s own proposal by devoting $206 million per year to comprehensive sex education programs in our nation’s public schools. Giddy over the kudos such progressive legislation inevitably garners from the ACLU and Human Rights Campaign, Sen. Lautenberg gleefully stated in a press release announcing the bill that abstinence education “only tells young people half the story, and they need the full picture.”
That’s interesting phraseology from the esteemed senator from New Jersey. Apparently, offering children “the full picture” involves showcasing abortion, contraceptives, risky behavior and deviant sexual lifestyles as healthy and ideal alternatives to abstinence and chastity. Similarly, cheating children with “half the story” means providing programs that encourage children to exhibit self-restraint by instructing them in the physical and emotional benefits of abstaining from sexual activity until marriage.
Unfortunately, Sen. Lautenberg is only one of many congressional Democrats peddling such miry morality to the American people. California Rep. Henry Waxman, a man so far left only liberal Southern Californians or Bolsheviks would elect him, issued a report last year pointing to so-called falsehoods in abstinence curricula and bemoaning fictional increases in federal spending on abstinence education. Conveniently, Waxman failed to address the numerous exaggerations in many comprehensive sex-ed models while simultaneously neglecting to mention the fact that contraception-based programs commanded a 12-to-1 government funding advantage over abstinence education in 2002 alone.
Waxman’s blunders notwithstanding, no one can deny that there is a concerted effort under way across the nation to discredit abstinence-until-marriage education as prudish, medically inaccurate, unscientific and hopelessly out of step with the times. Contraception-based programs, on the other hand, are heralded as a boon to teen-kind. To the disappointment of those who actually desire that young people be physically and emotionally healthy, such false assumptions far too often form the basis for the sex education debate in this country.
Some have bought the lie that so-called “safe” sex approaches provide children with wholesome, down-to-earth scientific facts, taught with only the best interests of teenagers at heart. We hastily assume that those who write no-holds-barred sex-ed curricula are so virtuous and thoroughly honest that social agendas never even slip into their minds. Their sole desire is to offer children a better alternative for avoiding sexually transmitted disease and abortion. Paradoxically, organizations pushing “safe” sex as a way to diminish abortion rates are the same groups reaping mammoth profits from the procedure. Can anyone see a financial conflict of interests here?
That raises the most habitually used rationale for comprehensive sex education: Kids are nothing more than hormone-driven animals, so why not afford them a sense of security while they engage in hedonism?
Therein lies comprehensive sex education’s fatal flaw. Waxman and his allies often make the false assumption that teenagers are just as uncontrollable today as our liberal politicos were during their own youth. Their worldview is so drenched in post-modern, live-for-the-moment ideology that they cannot fathom the notion that young people might actually want to be held to a higher standard of behavior. Instead, they fall back on a pessimistic view and write the younger generation off as a lost cause.
But our generation is not a lost cause, as hard as that notion may be for sex-ed profiteers to stomach. We have the ability to exercise self-discipline and to understand the physical and emotional blessings resulting from chastity before marriage and faithful monogamy afterward. Far too often the left fails to give adolescents their due.
It’s time that changed.
While popular culture tells teenagers each day that engaging in premarital sex is fun and satisfying, it’s recklessly irresponsible to communicate the same message in the very education system that should be upholding principles of right and wrong. Our panic over the sexually transmitted disease epidemic is grotesquely hypocritical when we stop and realize how low society’s moral expectations have become for adolescents.
If you expect more of the younger generation, they’ll give you more; if you expect less, they’ll give you less. It’s the responsibility of parents and educators to set high behavioral standards. Throwing $206 million at programs that encourage children to cave in to every impulse won’t accomplish anything; placing confidence in the next generation and actually setting standards that require an iota of self-responsibility will.