Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
As one who was taught by Benedictine nuns in a Catholic elementary school, I grew up with some strange and possibly severe restrictions on what the nuns called “mixing” the boys and girls. More recently, when my adult children were in school, the Diocese of Rockford forbade Altar boys being on the altar at the same time as Altar girls! With that background, I thought I had seen it all. However, the State of Tennessee has just beaten that sorry record of over restrictive rules for school children. It seems that Tennessee state senators, in their infinite wisdom have updated their already suspect abstinence based sex education law by suggesting that holding hands is a gateway to sex.
“Last week, the Senate passed SB 3310, a bill to update the state’s abstinence-based sex education curriculum to define holding hands and kissing as “gateway sexual activities.” Just one senator voted against the legislation; 28 voted in favor. Since the bill specifically bans teachers from “demonstrating gateway sexual activity”, educators would be prohibited from even demonstrating what hand-holding is.” Truth Progress
I understand the concept of abstinence only programs. The nuns were in favor of that idea, and it worked as badly in the 1960’s as it does now. “In a new family life instructions bill, holding hands and kissing could be considered gateways to sex. Planned Parenthood said that allowing state government to define local sex education curriculum could backfire. According to a 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Study, 61 percent of Memphis City high school students and 27 percent of middle school students have had sex. That’s higher than the national average. Planned Parenthood said these numbers are why a new sex education bill promoting abstinence is not realistic.” WMC-TV
As I understand it, the State Senate of Tennessee has an ongoing problem with high school and middle school students having sex. Their educated response to this problem is to claim that holding hands is a dirty and dangerous act that could lead to dire sexual health consequences. Under this proposed legislation, a teacher could be subject to a direct lawsuit from parents if the instructor goes beyond this draconian curriculum. Do these State Senators have any idea what is happening in the real world? The numbers quoted by the Memphis TV station above suggest that the State Senate should be happy if all the students are doing is hand holding. Could the respective religious beliefs of these State Senators be guiding their legislative hands?
Just how successful are these abstinence only programs? One George Mason University article in December 2006 discussed claims that any reduction in teen pregnancy rates is far and away due to contraception and not abstinence. “A new study has shown that contraception, not abstinence, is behind declines in teen pregnancy. Researchers from Columbia University and the Guttmacher Institute took a nation-wide look at why it is that teen pregnancy rates are down. In 1995, there were just under 100 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage women age 15-19, according to the Guttmacher Institute (the figures vary slightly among the three major sources for teen pregnancy rates – the Guttmacher Institute, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion). By 2002, this had gone down to just over 75 per 1,000. According to the new study, 86 percent of the decline is attributable to the use of contraception, while only 14 percent is attributable to abstinence. Abstinence has only contributed to a small percentage of the overall decline, and none for teens aged 18-19. For those ages 15-17, abstinence was responsible for about 23 percent of the decline, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.” stats.org
When the Tennessee House representatives take up the Senate bill, I hope that they look beyond religion and realize that the teen pregnancy problem won’t be solved by burying their heads in the sand. A sex education program designed by educational experts and not Bishops, can have a positive impact on teen pregnancy. Outlawing teachers from actually talking about the real issues could defeat what the legislators are trying to accomplish. However, since Tennessee just passed a law allowing creationism to be taught alongside evolution, I am not holding my breath that the legislature in Tennessee will do the right thing.
Do you think religion is getting in the way of proper education principles and methods? Are the state representatives pandering to a particular segment of their citizens rather than suggesting and promoting valid, scientific methods to address the problem at hand? What do you think?
“In its recent practice, the radical side of U. S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for governments by literal biblical interpretation. … [Unfortunately, critical] bluntness is frequently muted by a pseudo-tolerance, the polite reluctance to criticize another’s religion. However given the wider thrust of religion’s claim on public life, this hesitance falls somewhere between unfortunate and dangerous” — Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: the perils and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century
Those who would intrude their religious nationalism into the secular life of the nation will always interpret “polite reluctance to criticize” as weakness inviting further, and ever-more-ruthless assaults. The time to bluntly and honestly criticize the political exploitation of religion arrived some time ago and may have passed beyond recall. Whether a tardy and tepid acknowlegment of the danger will do much good, or whether only a full-on counter-assault by the secular will suffice, remains the unanswered but vital question. In any event, we should try to repudiate the coordinated assault on the separation of chuch and state as best we can. As Thomas Jefferson warned us:
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
Failure to break up this mutual-protection-and-abetting alliance will only perpetuate the abuses to which priests and despots will only too willingiy subject us.
When scrutinize church with its many anti Christ oppressive laws having no bearing on saving the soul not seeking to love all as one, and the legal laws of man doing the same being connected to the state we have not a separation of church, and state . There is a combination of the two being the same in spirit. deception is the devils tool.
You could be right pete.
Michael Murry,
The best way to keep the base in line is to always have a boogeyman man waiting in the wings.
“I hope that they look beyond religion and realize that the teen pregnancy problem won’t be solved by burying their heads in the sand.”
If I may say so, it does not appear that those who nurture and perpetuate these “problems” have any interest in solving them. In fact, precisely the contrary seems the case.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: “Controversy equalizes wise men and fools alike — and the fools know it.” So the rabid right continually shouts: “Teach the Controversy!”
James Carroll wrote, in Crusade: chronicles of an unjust war: “Only a fool would define a problem in such a way that he cannot solve it.”
Not just fools, though, but those who understand fools and how to divide and distract them into fighting among themselves instead of uniting against the upper class that relentlessly robs and bullies them. As Shelley wrote in The Mask of Anarchy:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
You are many, they are few
“The object of all this breast-beating underdoggery is not to unvictimize the average American for whom conservatism claims to speak. … the backlash is something very different: a crusade in which one’s material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.” Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?
So, yes, we can quite clearly see “the state representatives pandering to a particular segment of their citizens rather than suggesting and promoting valid, scientific methods to address the problem at hand.” Not to notice and repudiate this relentless “Teach the Controversy” fascism not only seems innocent beyond explanation but politically and economically fatal, as well.
From Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House:
“Then why the [anti-sex] laws?”
“They’re bad laws,” said Billy. “If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth – those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.
“Why this is, I do not know. That is one of the many questions I wish somebody would ask the machines. I do know this: The triumph of that sort of disgust and terror is now complete. Almost every man and woman looks and feels like something the cat dragged in. The only sexual beauty that an ordinary human being can see today is in the woman who will kill him. Sex is death. There’s a short and nasty equation for you: ‘Sex is death. Q. E. D.’”
The current proliferation of more bad anti-sex laws by the Republican Party in so many states throughout America testifies to the bankruptcy of their political and economic prescriptions for the country. Nevertheless, the unqualified success that they’ve had for decades nurturing and flogging these unresolvable cultural non-issues testifies equally to a confident belief in their continued utility. And who, if anyone, will prove that confidence unfounded?
From 1984>, by George Orwell, Part II, Chapter III:
“… With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual Puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was :
‘When you make love you’re using up energy ; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot ?’
“That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.”
The Republican Party — Sex Gone Sour
Dogs dont hold paws. We dont pray in groups. The pack decides who is a bad dog. We poop in the church yard.
By admitting you are a sinner is the beginning to being saved. Jesus came to save the soul. The body sins because this body can’t survive being in Gods glory. This body kills life to live a very shot time.
Love like Jesus loves, and talk like Jesus talks ,and be saved. It is by his grace that we are saved.
You are4 not rejecting him. Sex, and nudity will not lose you your soul.
It seems that Tennessee state senators, in their infinite wisdom have updated their already suspect abstinence based sex education law by suggesting that holding hands is a gateway to sex.
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raff
when i was 17 a girl talked me into going to church with her. when the preacher said almost those exact words about holding hands, i got up and left.
i’m now 52 and except for weddings and funerals i haven’t been in a church since.
apparently i haven’t missed much
Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn jesus. legal system does that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
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Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn jesus. legal system doers that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
You are right AY.
And people are concerned about Sharia law being imposed here? Too many of these rules and laws are seem to mirro those of Iran, Iraq, etc.
Raff,
You went to law school right….. You have no other options…..
Swarthmore,
I guess I committed many mortal sins!
Dredd,
Ones reality in the real world is grounded in their own reality…… One may or may not know what is socially acceptable……
Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn joust. legal system doers that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
The catholic school kids around here are the wild ones and the fundamentalist crowd is abstinence only but not really. Some girls wear chastity rings.
When I was in high school an Irish priest came and taught religion once in awhile instead of the nuns. He said that if you kissed for longer than 10 seconds you committed a mortal sin.
He is a crafty bastard, raff. I’ll have to give him that.
Gene,
you may have been under the Devil’s influence when he used your words!
Hilarous Woosty!! Thanks!