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The New Sex Education: Homosexuality
| Article
# : |
16838 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1989 |
8,844 Words |
| Author
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William E. Dannemeyer
Congressman William E. Dannemeyer (R-California) is a member
of the subcommittee on Health and the Environment. He has
dealt closely with the issue of AIDS. This essay is excerpted
from his forthcoming book Shadow on the Land: Homosexuality in
America, to be published by New York Ignatius Press this fall. |
Thirty years ago sex education was largely neglected in our nation's public schools. This lack of commitment to sex education on the part of most Americans was probably the result of a long-standing assumption that such matters were better discussed in the home and that classroom time was better spent in learning math, English, history, and languages.
The fact that parents often neglected to have that little talk with their children did not seem terribly important, since by junior high school virtually every youngster had gotten the word through an ancient and fairly reliable grapevine. No doubt a lot of misinformation was passed around, some of it disturbing, most of it harmless; but relatively few young people were getting into serious trouble.
For example, teenage pregnancy was not a nationwide problem, nor was illegitimate birth. These things did happen occasionally, but when a girl got pregnant, the young man usually married her. To be sure, some of these marriages did not work out, but a surprising number did. And weighing all the pros and cons of sexual mores thirty years ago, most thoughtful Americans would probably say we were better off then than now.
Last year more than one million unmarried teenagers got pregnant. More than five hundred thousand had their babies out of wedlock, and another four hundred thousand had abortions. But these statistics do not begin to reckon the cost in human suffering, not only to the young women themselves, but also to their families, to the young men with whom they were involved, and to the children produced by such liaisons. While some say that abortion is a simple, safe solution, the physical and mental trauma are often severe, particularly if the people involved and sensitive to the moral issues involved.
Of course, organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) use these statistics to argue in favor of sex education for all young Americans, maintaining that with more instruction in the use of birth control methods none of these things would occur. Yet even as the amount of sex education in our schools has risen over the years, the problem it was meant to address has not gone away. In fact, there is no indication that the amount of money spent on sex education has resulted in lowering the rate of teenage pregnancy or in reducing teenage sexual activity.
Yet Planned Parenthood and SIECUS continue to push for more
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