In 1956 Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin wrote The American Sex Revolution. In it he said, “This sex revolution is as important as the most dramatic political or economic upheaval. It is changing the lives of men and women more radically than any other revolution of our time. . . . Any considerable change in marriage behavior, any increase in sexual promiscuity and sexual relations, is pregnant with momentous consequences. A sex revolution drastically affects the lives of millions, deeply disturbs the community, and decisively influences the future of society.”
Those words were penned over half a century ago. How true they appear in 2009. If we look at just one nation – England – we quickly discover how accurate Sorokin was. Consider three recent reports coming from this country concerning the issue of sexuality. They certainly speak of “momentous consequences”, and do not auger well for the future of civilisation.
The first story concerns a National Health Service leaflet which states that school kids have a “right” to a hot sex life. The NHS has produced a document called “Pleasure” in which it tells teens that along with eating lots of fruits and veggies, “sex or masturbation twice a week” is good for their health.
The slogan of the campaign is “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. I wish I could say I was making this up, but alas I am not. According to one media report, the knucklehead behind this campaign “believes that as long as teenagers are fully informed about sex and are making their decisions free of peer pressure and as part of a caring relationship, they have as much right as an adult to a good sex life.”
Never mind our skyrocketing rates of teen promiscuity, teen pregnancies, teen abortions and teen STDs. Our dizzy sexperts want our kids to just do it. For them the highest value in life seems to be an orgasm, and the worst thing in life seems to be acting like a human being who does not need to descend to the level of animals and give in to every sexual urge that comes along.
But this is all part of how our elites are running the asylum. They have simply told kids to give in to whatever craving they experience, and forget about such things as self-control, temperance and delayed gratification. And they have especially told the kids to forget about anything smacking of morality.
Indeed, the second story has to do with more English sexperts spewing forth their perverted understanding of human sexuality. It seems that the children’s minister, Beverley Hughes, is about to circulate a government leaflet which tells parents to keep morality out of sex lessons.
As the Sunday Times reports, “Parents should avoid trying to convince their teenage children of the difference between right and wrong when talking to them about sex, a new government leaflet is to advise. Instead, any discussion of values should be kept ‘light’ to encourage teenagers to form their own views, according to the brochure.”
Great, just what hormonally charged teenagers need to hear. Forget all this business about right and wrong – just go for it. Perfect advice for wild dogs and mountain goats, but is it what impressionable young people need to hear?
In truth this is sheer madness. A moral framework is exactly what young people need as they confront such heady issues as human sexuality. To pretend that such a vital area can be a moral-free zone is absolute lunacy. Our prisons are already filled with amoral sex offenders, who have had drummed into their heads the mantra that we should just do whatever feels good.
Children need moral guidance in every area of life, not least of which in the area of sexuality. As social commentator Christina Hoff Summers has rightly remarked, “To my mind, leaving children alone to discover their own values is a little like putting them in a chemistry lab and saying, ‘Discover your own compound kids.’ If they blow themselves up, at least they have engaged in an authentic search for the self.”
Yet these mentally challenged sexperts want to strip the whole discussion of sexuality out of the moral framework in which it belongs. As former US Secretary of Education William Bennett put it, “Sex education has to do with how boys and girls, how men and women, treat each other and themselves — or, rather, should treat each other and themselves. Sex education is therefore about character and the formation of character. A sex education course in which issues of right and wrong do not occupy center stage is evasive and irresponsible.”
But we have now had decades of sex ed which tells kids all about the mechanics of sex, without a word about morality and what human personhood is all about. And the truth is, this approach has been a colossal failure. A number of reports on the success of amoral sex ed courses have appeared, and the verdict is not good.
Consider a very recent report, documenting how English sex ed courses have fared. As one English press account puts it, “A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving. The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex. But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were ‘significantly’ more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.”
Are we supposed to be surprised? For a half century we have been telling our kids that they are really just animals in an evolutionary world; there is no right and wrong; instant gratification of one’s desires is just hunky dory; all one needs is a condom; and notions such as self-control and learning to say no are antiquated Victorian hangovers.
Surprise, surprise. In such an environment, we have even more problems with teen sexuality. Duh. Maybe it is time to round up all those sexperts and government bureaucrats and force them to take up real jobs, and return to the traditional wisdom that has served us so well for generations.
To our ruling elites today, it may sound all very old-fashioned, but give me the advice of Alan Keyes any day: “If we encourage our kids to believe they can’t control their sexual desires, what of their greed, their anger, their prejudice, and their hate? What condoms will we distribute to protect them from the consequences of those? Perhaps it’s time we remembered that for a free people the first challenge of education is not to fill our children’s heads with knowledge, but to instill in their hearts the confidence they need to quell the storms and tempests of unruly passion.”
Edmund Burke was quite right when he wrote, “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
In the area of sexuality – as in so many other areas – we are in a moral freefall. While our elites promise us that freedom is the outcome of such sexual libertinism, the opposite is the case: we simply succumb to a new slavery, and in effect dig our own graves.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article6689953.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5780725.ece
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198228/6m-drive-cut-teen-pregnancies-sees-DOUBLE.html
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