You Want to Teach Her What?

Condom use is risky, even if a partner will use them. Leaving aside the reliability of this method of birth control, the reality of young people having sex outside of marriage increases greatly their chances of living on government assistance, living in poverty, and/or contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD) and passing both conditions on to their children.  However, especially in this economy, others say the remedy is our government’s providing free access to sex education and contraception. (CNN Opinion)

But many, many Americans now enjoy the widespread availability of birth control information and products, and access to abortion on demand. We are able to enjoy sex outside of marriage in ways our parents never could. But neither the pill nor abortion lowered the out of wedlock births, or contained STD’s.   In five decades since I graduated high school, we have gone from less than 7% births out of wedlock births to over 40% of the live births are now outside of marriage. (Source) And the news on how we are making our children and ourselves sick with infections is alarming. (Wiki on STD’s) What’s worse is the rise of entitlement thinking that assumes the government will pay for what we need to support our private choices. 

Now, the US government is funding, a $100,000 program to teach teenage girls how to negotiate condom use with their partners. (Washington Examiner)

Seriously?

Is the first fruits of Julia?

Negotiating with a partner to put on a condom is not a useful skill for a girl who is too young, or unable to support herself, a child, or to contribute to a long-term relationship.  And that condom doesn’t even keep her from the diseases that can disable or kill her – or him.   Certainly choosing safer lifestyles and avoiding pregnancies is a great life skill for girls 14-17 years old to learn! But if she is about to have sex with a partner who has to be negotiated into protecting her, she’s bought into the delusion that she has a right to what she can’t afford.

How do we say this in 140 characters or less? Texting or tweeting is how many young women – and men -- communicate; so, any life skill message must be brief as it is bold. Here are two:

·      Serving one's own passions is the greatest slavery.  ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomolia (17^th century)

·      Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.  ~Thomas Jefferson (18^th century)

 

If we won’t describe the reality of self-induced slavery, or the pain of hidden hooks that unwise sexual choices cause, in a few words, then we aren’t telling our children, especially the poorest among us, the truth.  We aren’t giving them life skills if we let them think what they want means they can only live on government subsidies.  

The freedom we know in harnessing our deepest passions, the safety we have in not getting caught in the snares of disease and poverty that unprotected sex among our young exacerbate -- these are gifts worth passing on, no matter the cost, especially to those who are the least of them. (The Lonely Life of Julia)