“They’re baaack!”

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In point of fact, they never went away: Activist parents, acting out of ignorance, acting out of a naïve desperation to inflict — through public classroom curricula — upon all America their clasping agendas; agendas that are without even the first consonant of scientific merit. A few years back it was “Intelligent Design.” It was also promotion of “abstinence” as the focus in sex education classes. The nationwide group pushing this current pedagogical “abstinence” paradigm calls itself “Parents for Truth.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/31/AR2008053101742.html?wpisrc=newsletter) “US Campaign to Promote Abstinence Begins; Groups are Enlisting Parents in Effort to Lobby for changes in Sex Education.”

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“Truth”? You’re going to get more of that commodity listening to forty year stale Soviet reports on glorious crop surpluses than you will from the Parents for it.

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Hmmm. I was a teenager once — way before the sexual revolution, way before the pill. Some 43 years ago I was 19. Do the math. Fifty years ago I was 12. And I am willing to wager that what I recall of those years is completely typical of what almost everyone my age recalls: The hormones had burst the damn, and the flood was incredibly inebriating. What a heady brew.

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Girls’ skirts were below the knee, and the blouses and sweaters were only a little more revealing than a burka. Whether the class matter was geometry or history or English did not matter. Everyone knew what was beneath the formless apparel, and that was what mattered most. At least 20 to 30 times every hour, and all through homeroom and through the class transitions in the halls . . . the mind wandered, and you know the paths down which it had sojourned.

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Trying to get a teenager to focus on abstinence is very akin to telling someone stranded on the desert not to focus on water. Not only is it counter to every law of nature, it’s insidious in the way it can instill seriously unhealthy precepts concerning sex.

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Teens thinking about sex is the most natural and healthy and necessary, and, yes, even beautiful, of evolutions from the prepubescent to adulthood phases in human life.

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Want to wax religious, which is the genesis of those fomenting over abstinence? Mary, esteemed by both the Christian and Muslim faiths, was either preteen 12 or in her very first teenage years when she bore Jesus. So do not endeavor to think of teenage sex as sinful, unless you are fully prepared to risk the consequences of that particular disingenuous disposition. Those particular dots lead unswervingly to the nexus that God, him- or her- or itself, is the cornucopia source of the most vile Sin. And unless you are equally ready to face each and all of the sanctions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, do not pretend to sex sans the veil of marriage as especially damning. Humans have been on earth more than a million years. The most reliable anthropological evidence tells us that marriage is at best a non-pan global 10,000 year old invention, and that marriage between just one man and one woman doesn’t even have biblical backing. As to sin, qua biblical sin, there are much, much worse trespasses to beware of. If one is to pick and choose, hatred of your brother or sister might be a more Christ-like jumping-off place; see Luke 10:30-37 and John 8:1-11.

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