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January 2, 2006
Water, water,
everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
Sex, sex,
everywhere, and not a speck of love.
Entering a new
year, taking time to reflect back and hope forward, I am struck by a
growing and persistent awareness. After forty years of national focus
on developing the perfect sex education programs for our children, we
are still missing the key element. Each year, we teach through the
sex manual, all 800 pages of it, and ignore the footnote on page 772
that contains the essential truth.
Sex education
today revolves around “medically accurate facts” updated hourly with
new research findings. We teach kids the long list of sexually
transmitted diseases, along with their causes and symptoms. We post
failure rates of condoms and devise easy-to-understand lessons to help
a twelve-year-old comprehend the meaning of a 14% failure rate for
condoms in preventing pregnancies.
We pass laws and
increase funding to make sure students get the medical facts. We host
conferences where the latest in research findings is relayed to
educators. And we write and film new hip-hop videos, dressing up the
facts in the latest version of “cool” so that teens might stop, listen
and heed.
This is all
important work. For many kids this information is reinforcement of
their personal commitment to sexual abstinence until marriage, and for
other kids it is the catalyst for making major life-saving changes in
their sexual behavior, even to the point of returning to sexual
abstinence.
But we are
teaching our children with only half an answer. We are teaching them
to preserve their physical health. Kids are making the connection
between physical health and the ability to chase their future
goals…education, career, and financial security.
As far as it
goes, it is a good education. But it is lacking. And it is lacking
the most important message. We know this. But we still fail to
seriously address the missing ingredient.
Teri, an
Education Director for city-wide sex education programs, states it
plainly. The more I’m in this business of sex education, the more
I’m convinced it’s not about sex. It’s about relationships. Love.
Intimacy.
Dr. Diggs, a
physician who can spout the statistical probability of catching any
one of the most common twenty-five STDs when using a condom, agrees
with Teri. Kids are not looking for sex. They are looking for
relationships. They are looking for somebody to whom they can be
known and who they can know at the same time. They are not looking
for sex.
Sex, sex,
everywhere, but who can teach our children about love? It’s the one
thing we adults, like our children, long for most in our lives, yet it
is one subject that cannot be boiled down into a 30-minute power point
presentation.
We can teach
love. But we must teach it through example. And that is not so easy
in a world now rocked with divorce and family breakup and in a culture
tempted by a media profiting from all acts of non-love that we can
imagine.
A new year
presents itself. New opportunities and new choices. At FROM THE
HOME FRONT, we are charting a new course for our columns. It is a
path dimly lit, but it is a path we must follow. It goes where our
children most want to go, and where we would want them to end up, if
we knew how to make it happen.
As writer, I
know no more than you, the reader. I am beset behind and beset before
with my own human weaknesses, my own frailties, and my own
temptations.
But this I know,
any goal so desired of mankind, must certainly merit the attention.
Your insights, your experiences, your questions are all invited in a
weekly consideration of love. At FROM THE HOME FRONT, in 2006,
we dedicate ourselves to the consideration of what makes life…and
sex…worth having. It is a year devoted to love.
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April 11, 2005
Why I Teach Abstinence
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for more past editorials.
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