While running on the treadmill this morning, I watched a disturbing news segment on CNN. A middle school in Portland Maine is now providing birth control to students without parental knowledge. What are they thinking???? "Oooh, we can't tell the parents we're giving their 11 to 15 year old the pill, because they might ground their child. That, of course, is bad for their self esteem."
What strikes me, is the acquiescence to the supposed inevitability of pre-adolescent concupiscence. According to Richard Veilleux, who said his child attends King Middle School, “This is about giving kids who are sexually active the tools that they need.” Sexually active kids? Kids? Kids!!!
This is just like the liberal mindset of our day. All they need are the the right tools. They just need more education.
In his essay, The Great Liberal Death Wish, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote,
If sex provides the mysticism of the great liberal death wish, it needs, as well, its own special mumbo-jumbo and brainwashing device; a moral equivalent of conversion, whereby the old Adam is ut aside, and the new liberal man is born--elightened, erudite, cultivated. This is readily to hand in education in all its mny branches and affiliations. To the liberal mind, education provides the universal panacea. Whatever the problem, education will solve it. Law and order breaking down?--then yet more statistics chasing yet more education; venereal disease spreading, to the point that girls of ten are found to be infected?--then, for heaven's sake, more sex education, with tiny tots lisping out what happens to mummy's vagina when daddy erects, as once they did the Catechism...
One problem, among many, with the idea of simply giving younger and younger children "education" and "tools" is that it reduces one's sexual perspective to mere mechanics. Which is not surprising as Malcolm Muggeridge also observed, "Sex is the only mysticism materialism offers, and so to sex the pursuers of happiness address themselves wih an avidity and dedication seldom, if ever, surpassed."
When pleasure is the only comprehensible end for the materialist to seek, then it is only natural for sexual deviance to proliferate, because, after all, sex is the penultimate pleasure (never mind that the direct pursuit of pleasure as an end is a futile endeavor). And why not? We have the blessed pill to isolate the pleasure of copulation from any inconvenient consequences.
Because, as we all know, the only two things anyone needs to concern themselves with in relation to sex are birth and disease, which leads me to the observation that so called comprehensive sex education is quite deficient. It ignores the overall context--the very spiritual and emotional design inextricably bound to our biological design. J. Budziszewski has written an excellent essay about that here.
Unfortunately, what these kids need are not "tools." Just giving them tools is most unhelpful in that it falsely assures them that they are safe to flout sexual design so long as they take measures to protect their physical plumbing.
