Berkshire Eagle Column 8-15-04
Berkshire EagleI, Publius
Sexual politics By Alan Chartock
Saturday, August 14, 2004 - The sex police are riding hard down in Texas where the powers that be seem to want to teach just the one, surefire way to protect our youth against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies -- abstinence. They don't want their curriculum to include information about the various kinds of protection available to students who are naive about sex.
The moralistic members of the right wing have been hard at work with the publishers of textbooks, making sure that information about condom use and pregnancy prevention techniques won't have a place in the books. Let there be no mistake about it: Kids are having sex, whether doing so is based on an intellectual decision or in the heat of passion. Unprotected sex puts them at great risk for AIDS, STDs and pregnancy. Of course, when these kids get pregnant, the same group of moralists are preaching that the young woman should bear the unwanted child.
The people who are apparently having their way in Texas are right here among us, preaching fire and brimstone and eternal damnation for sexual adventurism and misbehavior. This is not easy stuff. In fact, some of these same preachy people have been known to engage in the very endeavors they profess to abhor. This country is obsessed with sexual peccadilloes. Just look at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. You'd think that their affair was more important than our place in Iraq and the world community.
Hey, you can bet that all parents want their children to behave responsibly. Deep down, most us believe that teenagers are too young to handle sexual intercourse. We all hope that our schools will offer sex education courses that teach the consequences of such activity. Not telling kids about condoms and other forms of birth control is just plain dumb.
There is just no question that a fairly high proportion of our children will have sex and if they do, we want them to know what to do to protect themselves. We do not want to be beating ourselves up later, saying, "If only I'd leveled with my kid, she wouldn't have AIDS now."
When you talk to the "abstinence only" folks, they will tell you that if you make condoms available to young people, they will take that as a sign of encouragement to have sex. In a few cases, that might be so, but in a balanced and well-designed sex education class, the tradeoffs will be discussed.
Let's say that you are a high school nurse and a student comes to you and discloses that she is having a full-blown sexual relationship with her boyfriend. You obviously know that the kid is not going to make a U-turn. It is your job to protect that at-risk child.
I have never known of a case where a teenager said, "Hey, I got a free condom. I think I'll go out and have intercourse." Have you? This kind of stuff makes for an interesting debate, but is hardly the way the world works.
Kids get into sex for different reasons. In some cases, it's forbidden fruit. In others, kids want to make a baby to play with or force a partner to get married, shotgun style. Saddling a single, young mom or dad with a child can cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can cut off a productive life for some students and the very idea that these self-styled moralists would have us not educate our kids in one of the most important areas of their lives -- human sexuality -- is mind-boggling.
Of course, parents have a major responsibility, too. What about those parents who don't talk to their children about how much or what kind of television they watch or about sexual activity and the birds and bees? If a parent won't address this vitally important subject, shouldn't the public schools be held responsible for delivering the message?
If we are making decisions about what material to teach in schools, shouldn't we be deciding what to teach on the basis of how a child's life might be most affected? Is the risk of AIDS or pregnancy more important than the teaching of geometric theorems? From my perspective, it is. One teaches you how to think; the other involves life and death.
The whole debate has political implications as well. If President Bush, who in his later life says he believes in abstinence, is re-elected, you had better believe that there will be more encouragement toward those who want to muzzle sex educators. Remember those "blue states," where the Republican core vote comes from? These are the folks that George Bush needs to win. His guru, Karl Rove, knows that.
The age of presidential leadership, when you lead because you believe something is right, even when it will cost you something, seems to be behind us, at least where Bush is concerned.
Alan Chartock, a Great Barrington resident, is chairman and executive director of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and a professor of communications at SUNY-Albany. His web site is www.alanchartock.com

- posted by Alan @ 8/18/2004 08:09:00 PM