Calling all monogamous men

Carolyn Moynihan

Family scholar Patrick Fagan has come up with an elegant schema contrasting “monogamous” culture with other kinds of sexual culture which he calls, collectively, “polyamorous”. Speaking at the World Congress of Families recently in Amsterdam, he highlighted the gulf that exists between the two cultures in terms of values and practical consequences. And he proposed a solution.

Fagan, who is with the Family Research Council, argued that these cultures can only co-exist in once society if parents in both are given control over the programs that cause conflict: education, adolescent health and sex education.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/calling_all_monogamous_men/

The UN’s sex-ed plan for kids

Carolyn Moynihan

Some years ago I saw a cartoon whose subject becomes more real by the day. It showed a Brave-New-Wold nursery in which newborns were being instructed via a loudspeaker: “Today you will be going home, but before you go, here is your first sex education lesson...” I was reminded of it by a Fox News report of a new universal sex-ed curriculum from UNESCO.

The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has decided that, “in a world affected by HIV and AIDS”, it is “imperative” to teach children as young as 5 about masturbation as well as “gender roles, stereotypes and gender-based violence”.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/the_uns_sex-ed_plan_for_kids/

Conservatism reigns in Croatia

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

Abstinence education is celebrating a legal victory in Croatia.

Roger Kiska of the Alliance Defense Fund says the case was particularly dangerous because it involved a charter body of the Council of Europe. That body polices compliance with the European Social Charter -- a binding human-rights document on all states within the Council of Europe.

The case involved a lawsuit against the Christian nation of Croatia, which Kiska says has a low rate of teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The suit alleged that the country was not teaching appropriate sexual education in their schools because they focused on abstinence.

"So the potential of this case was to completely liberalize sexual education throughout Europe," he explains. "And thankfully the committee agreed with our arguments, agreed with the arguments of Croatia, that because of the cultural sovereignty of Croatia, because of the low prevalence of sexual transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies, obviously the program was working" the attorney notes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=660524

Abstinence, yes, but what about marriage?

Carolyn Moynihan

The abstinence-until-marriage movement in the United States has been a positive and courageous response to the sexual revolution. As the basis for sex education it has met with determined opposition because of adult scepticism, and probably dislike of the very idea of abstinence. Now a sociologist who is also an Evangelical Christian is suggesting another reason for reviewing the way Christians promote abstinence.

…[A]fter years of studying the sexual behavior and family decision-making of young Americans, I've come to the conclusion that Christians have made much ado about sex but are becoming slow and lax about marriage—that more significant, enduring witness to Christ's sacrificial love for his bride. Americans are taking flight from marriage. We are marrying later, if at all, and having fewer children.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/abstinence_yes_but_what_about_marriage/

U.N. Agency Calls for Teaching Children 5-to-8 Years of Age about Masturbation

By Christopher Neefus

(CNSNews.com) – A June report from the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) suggests children of all countries and cultures are entitled to sexual and reproductive education beginning at age five. The report, called International Guidelines on Sexual Education, was released in June in conjunction with the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization which works for universal access to “reproductive health care.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=52988

£6m drive to cut teen pregnancies sees them DOUBLE

By Daniel Martin

A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.
The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198228/6m-drive-cut-teen-pregnancies-sees-DOUBLE.html

Farah Fawcett cancer likely HPV STD

ABC news finds doctor who says, "So what? Don't stigmatize it..."
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7939402&page=1
They don't get it, the reason to make it known and clear is simple. It is easy to prevent.
And meanwhile we have a number of sex ed groups who teach that if it isn't vaginal, it isn't sex. A lot of kids believe it, and so the anal cancers and oral and throat cancers caused by HPV continue to rise. They are out there teaching that there's no stigma involved too.
Less stigma, more death. There's an advertising jingle.
Eric Richardson, M.D.

Student agrees - parents' rights rule over teachers'

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

An Alberta student is voicing his support through Facebook for a controversial bill dealing with sex education.
Bill 44 is the controversial human rights bill that was recently passed in Alberta, Canada. The bill gives parents the right to opt their children out of controversial sex-ed programs in school and carries stiffs fines for teachers who do not adequately warn parents when such programs and lessons take place.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=565024

Simmering sex-ed battle heats up

In 2007, the group (Free to Be) received approximately $540,000 in federal funding from the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to federal tax forms filled out by the nonprofit.

To receive that money, groups must abide by federal guidelines that include teaching “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity . . . that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects . . . that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society.”

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090607/ARTICLES/906079971/1350?Title=Sex-ed-battle-heats-up

Abstinence ed 'outperforms' comprehensive sex ed

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

According to a research analyst, comprehensive sex education does not outperform abstinence education.

Irene Ericksen of the Institute for Research and Evaluation says that media reports continually claim that abstinence education is a failure and that comprehensive sex ed is the only way to reduce teen pregnancies and promote safe-sex practices. She adds that they continually site a federal study that is riddled with myths and did not find abstinence education effective.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=533758

NC keeps abstinence education

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

While some states are dropping abstinence education, others will continue to use it -- including North Carolina.

School districts can teach either abstinence or comprehensive sex education, the latter of which Jere Royall of the North Carolina Family Policy Council believes encourages promiscuity. He tells OneNewsNow that abstinence education has proven itself.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=449216

Obama asked to keep abstinence education funding

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

The campaign to retain federal funding for abstinence programs in public schools continues.

The Obama administration supports what is called "comprehensive sex education," which Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association believes encourages young people to be sexually intimate. She fears losing federal abstinence funding but notes her organization has found that many lawmakers, when informed of the truth about abstinence education, will listen.

Continue...

Sex Education Best Kept at Home

Bioethicist Presents Chastity as Love's Defender

MEXICO CITY, JAN. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org)

Sex education is chastity education -- and these are lessons best taught in the family, said an expert at the 6th World Meeting of Families.
Italian Doctor María Luisa Di Pietro, associate bioethics professor at Rome's Sacred Heart University and president of the Science and Life Association, affirmed this during her address today to some 10,000 participants in the family meeting theological congress.

Continue: http://www.zenit.org/article-24789?l=english

Are the Prop 8 Ads Truthful? Part II Legal Hair-splitting and other Mumbo-Jumbo

The opponents of Prop 8 are doing their best to discredit our ads, because they realize that the ads are swaying the public. I thank them for continuing to call attention to the education issue. I believe this issue benefits our side, for reasons I will explain below.
Their argument is that our ads are false because Prop 8 has nothing to do with education, only with marriage. The Superintendent of Schools, Jack O'Connell made a an anti-Prop 8 ad, saying that our schools aren't required to teach anything about marriage." These decisions are made at the local level.
Technically, this is true. But if a school district elects to teach comprehensive sex education, then they are required by the Education Code to teach about marriage.
Here is the quote from the Ed Code

"Education Code 51933 specifies that school districts are not required to provide comprehensive sexual health education, but if they choose to do so, they shall comply with the requirements listed below.... instruction shall encourage communication between students and their families and shall teach respect for marriage and committed relationships."

So, you see, the Superintendent is technically correct: each district decides whether to offer comprehensive sex ed.
However, 96% of the districts choose to offer comprehensive sex ed. This choice triggers the obligation to teach "respect for marriage and committed relationships." Prop 8 is significant because it overturns the judicial decision that redefined the term "marriage." The 96% of school districts that offer comprehensive sex ed, will be required to teach respect for this new definition of marriage. Maybe schools will opt out of comprehensive sex ed, rather than comply with this provision. Maybe they won't. But those that offer sex ed, will have to comply.
You tell me: who is being misleading here?
Further, the Department of Education has a checklist for districts that offer comprehensive sex ed. This is a tool for school districts "to help guide your review of material for compliance with the Education Code 51933." I hope to have a copy of this checklist posted in the next couple days, so readers can see it for themselves. The seventh item on the checklist states:
"Instruction and materials teach respect for marriage and committed relationships." As you can see, there is no grade level specified for this particular requirement.
Interestingly enough, several of the items on the checklist do specify the grade level. For instance, "Commencing in seventh grade, instruction and materials provide information about the effectiveness and safety of all FDA-approved contraceptive methods in preventing pregnancy, including emergency contraception." The specificity of these requirements, in contrast with the open-ended requirement about teaching respect for marriage, leaves open the possibility that children younger than 7th grade could be taught about marriage, in its new meaning.
So who is being misleading here?
It depends on whether you think the ads are saying "with 100% certainty, small children will in fact be taught about gay marriage," or whether you think the ads are saying, "it is a distinct possibility that children of all ages could be taught about gay marriage."
The ad states: "Teaching children about gay marriage will happen here unless we pass Proposition 8."
This is the only statement in the ad that our opponents can possibly questioning. Every other statement tells what happened in MA, or reports what is in the Education Code. And notice this statement does not say at what age children will be taught about gay marriage. It doesn't say it will happen in all schools. It says it will happen, which is undoubtedly true: it will happen in some schools for children of some ages.
I doubt that this qualification will reassure the voting public.
There is one other slightly misleading thing about this whole argument. Even if we do pass Prop 8, it may still happen that children are taught about gay marriage in the schools. The gay lobby has other vehicles for acheiving its objectives: vehicles such as SB 777, which prohibits anything that "promotes a discriminatory bias" based on sexual orientation. But this fact is not particularly reassuring to the public.
The No on 8 Campaign is counting on the public to care about these finely grained legal distinctions between what is directly required vs. what is indirectly required. Oddly enough, the polls suggest that the public isn't buying it.

Comprehensive Abstinence Education

That's my latest article in The National Catholic Register.

The genius of the Singles for Christ program is that the young people are brought up within a social network of shared expectations. Most of the Singles for Christ were probably Kids for Christ or Youth for Christ. They probably have married parents who are Couples for Christ or widowed grandmothers who are Handmaidens for Christ. When they were teenagers, probably very few went home to empty houses, turned on a TV porn channel, and had unsupervised afternoons after school.

This abstinence program is more than a classroom experience. This is a full way of life that provides young people with an appealing future as part of a married couple.

The lessons are embedded in a community of supportive adults, who expect certain behavior and model that behavior. The adults prepare the young to participate in the adult life of the community, on the community’s terms.

Read it all here.

The Missing Headline: Unmarried Births Rise

My latest article on Mercator Net is here.

Horrors! The teen birth rate rises!

Thus spake the mainstream media when preliminary data from the Centres for Disease Control showed that the teen birth rate rose three per cent in 2006, the first rise since 1991. The mainstream media reacted true to form. They rounded up the usual suspects: abstinence education and those pesky Christian conservatives. If only the media had troubled to examine the whole report, though, they might have noticed a few things that didn’t fit their template of sex-education-good, abstinence-bad.
...
The unmarried mothers’ birth rate rose over twice as much as the teen birth rate. But the mainstream media did not find this worthy of comment. So, let’s ask ourselves why they choose to emphasize one figure, the increase in teen births, over an increase in unmarried childbearing.

Read it all here.

Sex Ed Failing to halt teen pregnancy

That is the headline in the UK Telegraph. I can't help but think that the US media would have had a slightly different "slant" on this story.

For example, here is the lead of the UK story:

Every year, almost 50,000 girls under 18 fall pregnant, leading critics to claim that government-led efforts to encourage safer sex are backfiring. The number who conceive is at its highest level since a multi-million-pound teenage pregnancy crackdown almost a decade ago.

As a result, Britain tops the league table of teenage mothers in western Europe, despite also having a record number of school-age abortions.

This comes despite the Government investing more than £150 million in an attempt to stem the tide of conceptions - and pledging to cut teenage pregnancy rates by half by the end of this decade.

I can't imagine reading this analysis in a mainstream US paper:

Amid a rising teenage population, the conception rate has dropped by only 11 per cent since 1998, in stark contrast to the 50 per cent target. At the same time, the overall number of teenage pregnancies has gone up to more than 47,000 a year.

In the 1970s, rates were similar across western Europe, but while other states have had marked success in bringing down the numbers of pregnancies, Britain now has the highest teenage birth rate: six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France.

Government policies aimed at dealing with the problem have allowed girls to obtain standard contraceptive and morning-after pills at school, without the consent of their parents, while new proposals will allow them to go directly to pharmacists.

In the US, the media typically blame similar statistics on those dreaded abstinence educators.
Here are some of the experts quoted in the UK story:

Last night, critics said that Labour's policies had backfired and made girls feel increasingly under pressure to become sexually active at a younger age. Others expressed fears that national targets were powerless in the face of a popular culture in which youth was increasingly sexualised.

Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust charity, said that the Government had allowed the "systematic removal of every restraint that used to act as a disincentive to under-age sex". There was no evidence that easy availability of contraception reduced teenage pregnancy rates, instead it added to pressure on young girls by normalising under-age sex, he said.

Mr Wells also attacked the Government's commitment to confidentiality policies about contraception which "kept parents in the dark about their children's sexual activity".

"The problems associated with teenage pregnancy will never be solved so long as the Government persists with its reliance on yet more contraception and sex education," he said. "What we need is a radical change away from a culture which has reduced sex to a casual recreational activity."

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said that the Government's failure was rooted in an attempt to find "state-led solutions" to problems that needed to be tackled by families and communities. "Our research has shown that progress is only being made in the areas where people are relatively well-off, whereas in deprived areas the situation is often getting worse.

"What we actually need is for family-led organisations, and local communities and the voluntary sector to work together on these problems."

Anne Atkins, a social commentator, said the emphasis on sex education and contraception was giving young people the message that sex at a young age was inevitable. "The message may be intended to be 'when you have sex, use a condom', but what young people hear is the 'when you have sex' part," she said.

I wish we got this kind of coverage in the US.

Contraceptive Fraud

This article was recently published in the Legatus magazine, an exclusively print magazine. I am reprinting it here, as many of my newsletter subscribers have expressed an interest in being able to link to an on-line version. Readers may also be interested in a similar article I did last summer on townhall.
That article caused near hysteria on the part of the left-wing nut-roots. This article actually deals with some of the common questions that the previous article raised. So, if you read the two articles together, you should have a pretty clear picture of my interpretation of this important set of data.

Contraception Fraud
Americans now believe that care-free sex is an entitlement. Contraception can prevent unwanted pregnancies. In the unlikely event of contraceptive failure, abortion can end a pregnancy. The belief that pregnancy is unlikely induces women to have sex in relationships that can not possibly support a pregnancy.
But is contraceptive failure all that unlikely? The most recently available statistics suggest that the young, the unmarried and the poor are more apt to get pregnant than they supposed.
Contraception advocates frequently offer statistics like those in Table 1, to convince young women that they can safely engage in sex. This Table shows the percentage of women who experience a pregnancy after a year of using birth control. The overall failure rate is 12.9%, meaning that 13 out of a hundred sexually active, contracepting women will be pregnant within 12 months. The “reversible” methods have failure rates ranging from 8% for the pill and 27% for withdrawal. Women look at charts like this, and conclude that pills or condoms protect them.
Advocates of contraception seldom provide information like that contained in Table 2. This table shows the contraceptive failure rates, broken down by relationship type, age and broad income categories. This study, published by the research arm of Planned Parenthood, allows a woman to see the failure rate most applicable to her own situation.
If a poor cohabiting teenager, for instance, looked at this data, she would find that for her, the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.
The results for the condom are even more dramatic. Over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using the male condom will be pregnant within a year. By contrast, the middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 6% chance of pregnancy after a year of condom use.
What is going on here? You wouldn’t think that the hormones in the pill could “know” whether a woman is married or not. Several factors are driving the differences in failure rates: fertility, maturity, commitment and amount of sexual activity.
Young women are more fertile than older women. Therefore, young women are more likely to get pregnant from any given act of intercourse, no matter what contraceptive method they use. The less mature, and possibly less stable individuals may not be using their contraception correctly or regularly. The commitment of married couples to each other makes it easier for married women to negotiate regular condom use. Finally, cohabiting women have sex more frequently than single women, so they have a greater chance of getting pregnant.
The government promotes contraception most heavily among the poor, the young, and the single, because their children are the most likely to become dependent on state support. Yet these targeted groups are the ones most likely to experience contraceptive failure. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. The “overall failure rates” are simply not relevant to this target population.
The false sense of security created by these inflated success rates of contraception may very well be seducing women to be sexually active in situations that can’t sustain the care of a child. These women would be far better off postponing sexual activity, or developing healthy relationship, or finishing high school. Yet the federal government spends approximately $12 on contraceptive education for every dollar it spends on abstinence education.
The government should insist that their programs provide demographically relevant information.
Otherwise, the rest of us should insist that the government get out of the sex ed business altogether.


“Contraceptive Failure Rates: New Estimates From the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth,” Haisahn Fu, Jacqueline E. Darroch, Taylor Haas, and Nalini Ranjit, Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 31, No. 2. March/April 1999, pp. 56-63.

Get the Government Out of Sex Ed

My latest Town hall article is HERE. The contraceptive failure rates commonly reported are very misleading. I cited a couple of articles from Family Planning Perspectives, published by the Allan Guttmacher Institute, which is the research arm of Planned Parenthood. Those articles show that contraceptive failure rates depend not only on the method of contraception used. The probability of failure also depends on the demographic characteristics of the user.
Some of my critics in the blogsphere seem to think I made these numbers up, just for meaness. These are Planned Parenthood's numbers. The question is: what do we make up them? What do they mean? There are 3 demographically relevant factors: age, poverty and marital status. I think there are probably several big issues behind these demographics: fertility, maturity, commitment and amount of sexual activity.
First, age is a proxy for both maturity and fertility. For any contraceptive method, young women are more likely to get pregnant than older women. This is a function of the fact that fertility naturally declines with age. Think about people you know: among the middle-aged, middle-class married women, you probably know some who are more worried about infertility than contraception. That is what the data are picking up when they show an overall failure rate of 15.2% for women aged 20-24 and 9% for women over 30. (table 4 of Ranjit et. al.)
Maturity matters because some of the younger, and possibly less stable individuals are probably not using their contraception consistently or correctly.
Commitment is very interesting: cohabiting women have twice the contraceptive failure rate of married women overall: 21% versus 10%. And even looking at comparable age groups and poverty status, cohabiting women have much greater failure rates than married women. See Tale 2 of Fu et. al. Cohabiting teenaged poor women have a 70% failure rate for condoms, compared with only a 23% failure rate for married poor teenagers. What does this mean? I suspect that the married couples have less difficulty negotiating consistent condom use. They have a shared future, which the cohabiting couples may not.
Finally, cohabiting couples have sex frequently than single people. This may account for the relative success of singles vs. cohabiting women of comparable age and income. Again, see Table 2 of Fu et. al.: the failure rate for the PILL is 48% for cohabiting poor teens, but only 13% for single poor teens.
Of course both these rates are higher than the officially published statistics of 8% for the pill, and 15% for the condom, which was my point.
Sex ed programs should be focusing on the failure rates that are relevant to the target demographic group, not the general population. If a middle-class, middle-aged married woman has a contraceptive failure, that is a private problem for her and her family. It has no social significance whatsoever, and is frankly none of the government's business one way or the other. Contraception failure among the poor and the young and the unmarried has become a public problem because the public is likely to end up supporting their offspring. That is why the government has taken it upon itself to teach sex ed in the first place. If the government is going to get involved, it should focus on demographically relevant contraceptive failure rates, not on some failure rates, theoretically obtainable in a world of perfect use. The point of the tables in these studies is exactly to show that perfect use is not the same as theoretically perfect use.
By the way, I am certainly prepared to believe that improved education can improve the consistency of contraceptive use. I'm not prepared to believe that there is any education program that will make a 13 year old behave like a 30 year old.
By the way, the shouting and screaming in the blogsophere, complete with commentary about my likely sex life, confirms what I believe is our new social norm about sex: Sex is a essentially a private recreational activity, with no moral or social consequences. We believe sex is essentially a sterile activity, and babies are an after-thought, an optional consumer life-style extra, if you happen to like that sort of thing. Many of the discussants at Pandagon seem to feel themselves cheated if they don't obtain the results that perfectly functioning contraception would create. I'm just the messenger: contraception doesn't always work. Shoot the messenger if you must, but that doesn't negate the message.

Re: "Does anything work in sex education?"

Find the article here.

A Government program that doesn't work???? Please tell me you're kidding. I don't really understand why people would expect sex education taught in government schools to have any effect, after all our children also rate at the bottom of industrial nations in all of the academic disciplines, don't they? Teaching math certainly seems to have no effect on our kids. I believe, and have read supporting statements, that abstinence (sp?, I went to government school) programs do work when presented as you outlined in your article.
We need more people like you.

When a couple has embraced the typical contraceptive lifestyle, even for the "best" of reasons, they are blinded to true chastity. They have accepted the phrase, "man is a sexual being" and therefore are trapped in the definition and all its consequences.

I say this because when we were developing our curriculum, low these many years ago, this was one of the phrases that we tried to purge from our work. Man is not a sexual being. He is a rational being made in the image and likeness of God. Even the first half of that phrase, "a rational being" re-orients your thinking. If a person "is" something, they are only complete when they fulfill their "is-ness". (Am I getting too confusing here?) So, if man "is a sexual being", then he is only complete when he is being sexual or committing a sexual act. Further, all acts then tend to be defined in relationship to sex. (Sounds rather Freudian!!). The sex ed people really think man is sexual and only fulfilled in their sexual acts.

If he is a rational being, then he is fulfilling his nature when he is engaging his intellect. The more his intellect rules his life, the better person he is. Of course, it must be understood that man can only reach perfection when he has enterd into the life of grace fully.

I believe we must shout from the rooftops that "man is a rational being made in the image and likeness of God" again and again and again. The incorrect definition has been repeated so many times that most of us are not aware of how it has crept in and influenced our thinking about ourselves and how we should live life.

This does not preclude dealing with our "sexuality", another phrase that has taken a life of its own and is usually not used properly. It is a means of seeing ourselves as a whole in the proper light, especially in relationship to God.

Unless abstinece education includes all of these truths, they will be total failures.