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Abstinence, Inc. = SIECUS Light
By Eunice Ray
USA Today reports on another failing grade in history as “Kids Get Abysmal Grade in History,” but there is no outrage or following fury. Could it be Americans no longer understand the vital role that history plays in maintaining a free society? While improving the bad history report may not draw the heat of big dollars and the light of large constituencies, there are armies massing in full battle array over sex and abstinence education, with a fortune in public funds as the prize to be won.
Since 1964, the government has plowed big dollars into “anything goes” Kinseyan-based sex education only to reap skyrocketing levels of disease, dysfunction and unwed mothers. In an effort to reduce the staggering welfare rolls, Washington wonks searched for ways to staunch the overflow of these child mothers “sexual freedom” poured into the now flagging system. They seized upon “Abstinence,” largely a movement conducted by pro-life church folks operating on a wing and a prayer, but everything changed in 1996, when the first federal dollars were appropriated for abstinence education. The current federal budget throws $135 million at abstinence education in hopes of remedying the problem it created in the 1960s with sex-ed funding. President Bush, an abstinence booster, asked for an increase of $33 million annually.
This week Rolling Stone magazine’s young tuned-in market-share read about public funding for sexual-abstinence in an article entitled “Virgin, Inc.” Those who get the money are; “[S]mall faith based and nonprofit organizations that might otherwise not be funded,” says Deputy Secretary of HHS, Claude Allen. Let the hallelujahs go up, finally, as Rolling Stone puts it, “The virgin business has boomed,” but is Abstinence really an answer to prayer? What is the abstinence message? According to Rolling Stone, the answer is hard to pin down.
What’s more significant is how abstinence messages are changing to keep and find new markets. Searching for wider relevance, promoters can’t preach to the choir; with federal money, they can’t even preach….‘We couldn’t include religion and be successful,’ Morris says….‘If I were to say that my program is religiously based, [Coleen Mast] says, it would hurt my business.’
What the government gives money to support, it also guides, and that includes curriculum content. In 1965, when federal dollars first bought textbooks and paid teachers, national standards for core content were imposed on schools across the country. After that McGuffy was out; values clarification was in; causing subjects like history, geography and civics to go by the wayside. As the government’s educational vision widened, the Sex Information and Education Council (SIECUS) was introduced into the classroom, as “the educational arm of the Kinsey Institute,” by Planned Parenthood’s Mary Calderone.
Now decades later it is well known that Kinsey cooked his scientific data and used pedophile sexual abuse “data” to claim humans had sexual needs and desires from birth disconnecting biology from the entire process. Procreation was out, pleasure was in and from 1955 until the 1980s, Kinsey’s fraudulent data was codified in states’ criminal codes. Kinseyan legal reformers prophesied sex education would reduce violent sex crimes and high rates of sex offender (rapists and child molesters) recidivism. After they had “abolished” legal protections for women and children, SIECUS expanded “the talk” from thirteen minutes to thirteen school years with the theme that all imaginable sexual acts at any age are simply “responding to a wide human need.”
Zoologist Kinsey said he sought to study sexuality outside the constraints of morality. He is credited with igniting the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which transformed America. Now ironically parents who expect sexual purity from their youngsters are in the struggling minority. But of late these parents have been greatly relieved by abstinence. They are no longer radicals on the fringe “preaching” the abstinence gospel and there is an affirmation that accompanies freely flowing federal monies. Abstinence promises to become mainstream in the 21st century. But before breathing too easily, somebody needs to ask, “what is the abstinence message?”
Well Rolling Stone is right. The abstinence message changes and varies with the curriculum: There is “Abstinence-Plus,” which, at best, is nothing more than SIECUS light; and there is “Abstinence Until Marriage,” the truest of them all. But if the substance, the moral content relative to the life process is prohibited due to government support, whatever it’s called, it isn’t an honest environment. Changing messages, barring religious content, absence of absolute truth—it can’t provide an honest environment. It is hard for Christian parents to grasp, but schools today follow the NEA recommendations for a K-12 curriculum following the Planned Parenthood/SIECUS agenda, usually without parental notification.
For Christians it’s even dicier. It’s more fundamental than selecting brands of Abstinence curriculum. By what authority does a Christian teach other people’s children about the life process or, as Kinseyans say, “sex”? As well-meaning Christians teach other people’s children Abstinence by showing explicit photographs of diseased genitalia, they do well to heed Martin Luther’s warning of hundreds of years ago that those who focus on the act, or the organs involved, have fallen into the grossest of idolatry.
For human nature cannot keep within bounds or preserve in a sensible and godly manner what has been handed down correctly and scrupulously by the forefathers, but it turns aside at once either to the right or to the left. When the Midianites heard ....the power of procreation enjoyed such great honor, they soon fell into the most indecent idolatry…such is the custom of idolaters; they appropriate only the works of the ceremonies after they have abandoned the Word and the Spirit….the world always imitates the customs and rites of the fathers. But it cuts off their head; that is, it does away with faith, the promise, and the command of God and retains the deed itself or the outward performance of the work….It is surely to be lamented and deplored that human nature has been so horribly corrupted. Therefore one should curb the sensual desires with all zeal, repress and detest concupiscence, and strive after modesty and chastity.
Luther declared the folly of a human sexuality education agenda sans moral absolutes. Separation of “sex” from morality is all form, no substance. The evidence of this error being blithely repeated today by Christians is found, of all places, in Rolling Stone, which reports on Abstinence educator, Ms. Dowling, with “dark and glossy lips, passion, fun and playful,” provocatively telling the children, if you wait until marriage, “you can have sex for breakfast, lunch and dinner, worry-free.”
The substance of this entire matter is, well, historic. In Genesis we learn marriage is God’s first institution for which Luther says the “ultimate purpose [of marriage] is to obey God and to be a remedy for sin; to call upon God; to desire, love, and bring up children to the glory of God; to live with one’s wife in the fear of the Lord; and to bear one’s cross.” As it was with Genesis and Luther, so it was in American law and custom, that is, before Kinsey made pleasure the measure for human “sexual behavior.”
Do not be deceived little children. Even SIECUS is not without religious moorings. Its religion is secular humanism and, since 1965, government schools have been humanist parochial schools. Under their system, man is presented as god and judge of his thoughts, words and deeds. To the humanist, sex knowledge is fundamental to religious freedom. Abstinence may be a bridge from humanist sexuality in the schools, but to what? While the mission of Abstinence Until Marriage is laudable as a disease prevention and welfare reduction measure to increase the nation’s health and economic stability, for Christians government money is coupled with severe limits. Refashioning what, for many Christians was a ministry to protect youth from the fleshly sins of fornication, sodomy, etc., has become “Virgins, Inc.,” a business devoid of God and often His standard.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ have no Biblical authority to teach other people’s children about the life process, much less to introduce a gentler kinder view of human sexuality for fear of disease or pregnancy in the form of “SIECUS Light.” The Church, comprised of Christians, is the Bride of Christ, and the Bride’s mission is to remember God’s historic generational perspective of the life process and not focusing on the mere human act associated with God’s transmission of human life. Rather it falls to parents to instill in their own children, the Godly principles of faith, duty, self-government and responsibility which are historically guaranteed in all of time to yield personal purity, which only can lead to national healing, renewal, and restoration.
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