“Faith based” sex education

Maxed Out Mama has a <a href="http://maxedoutmama.blogspot.com/2005/08/faith-based-sex-education.html".really terrific piece that I meant to link to last night.

I just had to make a comment about Planned Parenthood’s foray into faith-based sex education, scientific and medical irrationality. I also want to take a good strong whack at those who claim that there is no such thing as a secularist agenda in sex education in this country.

She brings you lesson plans and pdf files – all of which war very interesting and will get your head shaking, like this:

The Sexual Values of Two Systems
Fixed or Absolutist World View
1. Sexuality is basically animal passion and lust, genital, and must be controlled.
2. The main goal of sex is marriage and reproduction.
3. Sex is only acceptable in heterosexual marriages.
4. Masturbation, oral sex, same-gender relationships, and contraception all thwart God’s purposes for sex and are forbidden.
5. Strict gender roles in relationships with male active and superior.
6. Emphasis on sex as genitality and on genital acts.

Process or Relativist World View
1. Sexuality is a natural and positive life force with both sensual and spiritual aspects.
2. Sex does not have to be confined to marriage; pleasure, love, and celebration are goals in themselves.
3. Tolerance or acceptance of same-gender relationships.
4. God’s purpose for sex is to celebrate life; masturbation, oral sex, and same-gender relationships can express the celebratory and communion nature of sex.
5. Flexible, egalitarian gender roles.
6. Emphasis on people and their relationships rather than on what they do genitally.

Adapted from a summary by Linda L. Hendrixson, 1990.

Sez MOM: Note the rather religious framework and the lack of any discussion that maybe, just maybe, the “fixed” worldview might have a point about bad consequences from careless and promiscuous sex. Frankly, I would say this is an attempt to propagandize adolescents into the right “religious” views about sex, which is a very celebratory, spiritual and communion-like affair with random partners until your genitals start itching.

What was it Cardinal Ratzinger cautioned us against just before he became Benedict XVI? Oh, yeah…”beware the dictatorship of relativity…”

After a long exposition of exactly what sorts of risks kids really face, she writes:

I am sick to death of the sanctimonious prating of people who complain about prudish or unrealistic outdated sexual morality. We would not accept risk factors like those listed above for any other category of human behavior. The idea that teenagers are unable to control themselves is ridiculous. They aren’t getting the facts because of a truly neurotic reverse prudery.

MOM’s post is long and powerful and I am not going to do it justice by excerpting from it. Go read it. It’s a keeper.