CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Conservatives, Sex Education, and the Myth That it Doesn't Work

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

this entry brought to you by the ting tings, "that's not my name"


I think the conversation started with this story.



I've mentioned her a bunch of times before on this page, this friend of mine who is a conservative Christian, mother of three children, about to give birth to a fourth, has only been married for four years, and hasn't spent more than 6 months not being pregnant since marriage. I like talking to her about things where her opinion differs from mine, because I honestly don't understand how people get some ideas in their heads, and what their reasoning is. Hearing someone that I otherwise respect voice these rationalities is fascinating.

We were talking about the story in England about the 13 year old boy who is a father, having gotten an extremely bland looking 14 year old girl pregnant, and they decided to keep the baby. If you read the above article, there's a quote from a Christian bozo who says "...This is symptomatic of the over-sexualization of our youngsters and shows the policy of value-free sex education just isn’t working." My friend brought up something similar, saying that she didn't believe in sex education.

The thing that always bowls me over about people that support abstinence education is that they rely entirely on anecdotal evidence that teenagers are having sex more than they ever have before, despite the fact that the science clearly shows otherwise. Yes, there's been an up tick in the national average of teen pregnancies-- but the states that switched to abstinence education are the only ones that have gotten significantly higher numbers for the past decade, while the states that kept their sex education programs have remained relatively the same.

My friend, of course, when I brought this up, said that she'd read statistics on-line that said the exact opposite. But, I countered, if these states have only started abstinence education in the past ten years, wouldn't it follow that teen pregnancies would be down even more, not up since they started? She didn't really have an answer.

She's a sweet person, so I wasn't trying to be argumentative. As I say every time I write an entry about conversations with her, I genuinely enjoy her company. I don't want to paint the picture that she's a villain, because she's not. Which is exactly why I'm so interested in her opinions, and how she can keep them despite being so very wrong. If you never encounter these people, or if, when you do, they come off as nasty and self righteous, it's very easy to write them off. When they come off as sweet, genuinely nice, non-hypocrites, you want to dig deeper, to see exactly how someone reasonable could hold these fallacies so dear.

She told me that she didn't think it was right for children to be taught sex education, that they're teaching kids so young and there's no way they can grasp the ideas being taught. "Like, I know for a fact that they're teaching kids as young as first grade about sex and alternative lifestyles," she said. Which is a lie that's gotten an obscene amount of legroom to breathe and exist despite being easily proven wrong.

I shook my head. "My daughter is three months away from graduating first grade, and it hasn't come up yet."

"Well," she said, "I know that kids as young as the seventh grade are having sex." She scoffed. "Kids weren't even having sex when I was in the seventh grade, and I'm only twenty-eight."

My eyes widened and I nodded. "Uhm, yes, they were," I said.

"No they weren't, of course they weren't!" she retorted.

"I'm only two years older than you, and they were having sex when I was in the seventh grade," I said. "I was never cool enough to be invited to these parties, but I was cool enough to know that they were going on."

My friend told me that she never went through the sex education courses. Parents have to sign permission slips for sex ed, and hers never did. Which was just fine and dandy with her, she would go into the library and read. I thought it was interesting that she's a conservative Christian, presumably had friends that were also conservative Christians who didn't even participate in sex education, just as I had friends that were comic book geeks that talked about music and movies. Of course she wasn't aware of the kids having sex. Why would she? She probably wasn't aware there were kids her age smoking pot and getting drunk, either, yet that happened as well.

She said she didn't need sex education-- she learned all she wanted to know about sex from her parents. She said she was really comfortable talking about sex with them.

I found this statement flabbergasting. Have you ever known someone who, when talking about something that they are defensive about, make up weird lies about it? Let's say you have a friend from a foreign country that's, say, gone to war with another country needlessly, and they constantly decry about how much bullshit their country has done, but when you bring up how they invaded such-and-such, suddenly they're weirdly defensive and back peddle and make up weird lies about it?

That's what I felt she was doing. This person has told me countless times how crazy religious her parents are. When Obama was elected, they called her up and told her it was the end times, that Barack Obama was going to bring about the Apocalypse, and that it was all written in the book of Joshua, which she should start reading up on. And they were serious. And yet here she's telling me she was perfectly comfortable talking about sex with them.

First of all, I wanted to say, you're lying. Nobody likes talking about sex with their parents. No parent likes talking about sex with their kids. This is a lie, and a weird one at that.

But let's presume, for the sake of argument, that she was comfortable talking about sex with her parents. She would still have to recognize that other kids don't like talking about sex with their parents, right? She recognized that other parents don't like talking about sex with their kids?"

I've written all this to come to this point: My friend, much as she is a good person, much as she is a sweetheart, and much as I wish her well and am concerned with her when things aren't going well, has been pregnant four times in four years of marriage. She has never gone six months without being pregnant. She has admitted that the first baby was conceived out of wedlock, and it was with some counseling with her priest that got her through that.

And somehow, this person, as sweet and thoughtful as she is in many things that we talk about, somehow doesn't see sex education as beneficial. She's old enough to now know that kids have sex with one another, and believes it started at the time she started noticing it, and somehow doesn't think that every single person before her didn't come to the exact same conclusion when they hit adulthood. She doesn't see an up tick in teen pregnancies as being a direct result of abstinence education, despite the fact that the up tick started right around the same time the abstinence education started.

The above mentioned 13 year old boy who impregnated a 14 year old girl in England is, somehow, an indictment of sex education in general, an indictment on liberal, secular society, despite all evidence to the contrary. I don't get it.
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with love from CRS @ 7:55 AM 

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