Sex Education? OR CHASTITY EDUCATION
By Mary Beth Bonacci All About Issues, March-April 1992
Mary Beth Bonacci, MS’S., is editor of VOICE magazine and director of the Alliance for Chastity Education, P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22554.
The current debate over sex education, while very necessary, is sometimes very confusing. Is all sex education bad? What kind of sex education is bad? What exactly is sex education, anyway?
Much of the confusion has been over semantics. How do you define what is and isn’t sex education? Some would say that any classroom education which uses the word "sex" (including discussion about the sixth and ninth commandments) constitutes sex education. Others, including the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), define it a little more broadly. According to them, sex education has four objectives. The first is information, including, ". . . accurate information about human sexuality including growth and development, human reproduction, anatomy, physiology, masturbation, family life, pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood, sexual response, sexual orientation, contraception, abortion, sexual abuse, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases." Second is attitudes, values and insights, ..... [to] question, explore and assess sexual attitudes and feelings in order to develop their own values." Third is relationships, and fourth is responsibility, .... . encouraging the use of contraception and other sexual health measures." (SIECUS, Winning the Bank, p.2)
I have always been strongly opposed to SIECUS/Planned Parenthood type sex education. These programs, apart from being laden with values contrary to Christian morality, are an invasion of the student’s privacy. They take the very personal details of sexual intimacy and make them public. I have just recently heard two separate stories: one of a class forced to watch a film of a couple having sex, and another of a new Planned Parenthood school film featuring animated characters masturbating. These programs are obviously highly damaging, and must be stopped.
But then what? Even without classroom sex education, our children face a culture saturated with sexual misinformation and stimulation. Many of their parents are as confused as they are. What are we as educators and especially as religious educators, to do? Do we simply ignore this, the greatest of threats to their health, their emotional stability and their eternal souls?
I cannot, in good conscience, stand by and watch this destruction of our young. There is too much at stake ... the future leadership of our world, for starters, not to mention the millions upon millions of individual souls these kids represent.
So, I travel around the country, speaking to kids, parents, teachers (and anyone who will listen) about chastity. Yes, chastity. That unrealistic, forgotten virtue of the pre-pill era.
But certainty kids in this day and age won’t respond to mere exhortations to chastity! Many adults remember an era where sex was regarded as something dirty, and chastity meant avoiding holding hands and patent leather shoes. But the good news is tat kids, never having heard of chastity, have also never heard of all the excess baggage that may have come with previous misunderstandings of the virtue. We’re free to start from scratch, and teach chastity in all of its blazing, positive glory.
Positive? Yes, I tell them that chastity is positive. It’s more than just avoiding sex so that you don’t get pregnant, get diseases, or go to hell (although it is all of those things too). Chastity is about living and respecting our sexuality the way his, the way God made us, allowing us to participate in and find real love, God's love. Because, when it comes right down to it, kids aren’t looking for sex, they’re looking for love, and they’re not finding it in sex. They need to hear that they'll find it in chastity.
How do they respond to this "unrealistic" virtue? Enthusiastically! Kids today are starved for guidance, starved
For guidelines and for someone to give them rights and wrongs with reasons behind them. They’re unbelievably grateful when someone actually takes the time to explain in a positive way why they shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage. Many of them have been silently suffering the emotional and physical consequences of extramarital sex but haven’t known what was wrong or where to turn.
I don’t discuss the details of sexual intercourse in my chastity program. Neither do the other chastity educators I know. Sex is private, sacred, holy, and a good chastity program reinforces that sense of reverence; it doesn’t erode it. Kids leave a chastity talk inspired, not aroused. They leave with a new found respect for the awesome power of God’s gift of sexuality - of participating with Him in the creation of human life.
John Paul II clearly recognized the need for a renewed respect for the awesomeness of the gift of sexuality when he dedicated the first Wednesday audiences of his pontificate to the "Theology of the Body." That same need exists among our teens.., a need for the understanding of wiry sex is sacred, why it belongs in marriage, and why God created us male and female, as sexual beings. We need good programs, in the churches and the schools, to help parents and teens regain that reverence.
SIECUS’s "sex education" is certainly not helping them. But nether will our silence.