The
anti-life legislators in the Philippines
continue to insist on mandatory sex
education for young children. There
is abundant evidence from the experience
of many countries that such valueless
sex education increases promiscuity
and incidences of unwanted pregnancies,
STDs and HIV/AIDS. Such a seemingly
harmless thing as sex education in schools
will actually destroy the family, life
and faith.
‘Useless’
and ‘harmful:’ New York’s
sex education for children decried by
Vatican newspaper
Peter
Baklinski | Thu Sep 01 16:37 EST | Abortion
VATICAN
CITY, Rome September 1, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com)
- An editorial in the Vatican’s
official newspaper has lambasted the
decision of New York’s Department
of Education (DOE) to mandate
sex education for children, grades 6
through high school.
“It
is not clear why public institutions
in the West continue to have such magical
trust in the effectiveness of sex education,”
said Lucetta Scaraffia, the author of
the editorial in L’Osservatore
Romano.
When
the results of
sex education prove again-and-again
to be “disastrous, you
pretend not to know it,” Scaraffia
said. “It is much easier to ignore
the problem, pretend to resolve it with
useless, and even harmful, school courses,
rather than address the issue which
underlies it.”
The
core problem,
said Scaraffia, is
the “resounding failed utopia
of the sexual revolution and subsequent
breakdown of the first institution of
moral education, the family.”
In
an August 9th letter to New York school
principals, Chancellor Dennis Walcott
said that he believes that the school
system has an “important role
to play with regard to educating our
children about sex and the potential
consequences of engaging in risky behaviour.”
“We
must be committed to ensuring that both
middle school and high school students
are exposed to this valuable information
so they can learn to keep themselves
safe before, and when, they decide to
have sex.”
The
city’s sex education curriculum
is part of a $127.5 million effort called
The Young Men’s Initiative, funded
in part by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of
Bloomberg Philanthropies and billionaire
George Soros of the Open Society Foundations,
to “tackle the broad disparities
slowing the advancement of black and
Latino young men.”
“We
want all New Yorkers, in all communities,
to succeed. To make that a reality,
we must face some very sobering facts
about who is succeeding and who is not,”
said mayor Bloomberg in his January
2010 State of the City address.
“So
today, our question is: How can we connect
black and Latino young people—especially
young men—to the opportunities
and support that can lead them to success
and allow them to participate in our
recovery?”
Part
of the city’s answer to the mayor’s
question includes promoting contraception
and abortion to the youth.
“The
City’s clinics, in particular,
must be places that teens feel comfortable
entering, with practitioners who bring
an expertise in serving this population.
The City should also explore means to
ease the process by which young people
can access the Family Benefit Planning
Program, which will enable young people
to access confidential sexual health
services,” stated
the Report to the Mayor from the Chairs
of the Yount Men’s Initiative.
Scaraffia
argues, however, that current research
does not at all support the city’s
proposed sex-ed strategy, pointing out
that after years
of mandatory school courses in the UK
that focused primarily on contraceptive
methods, boys and girls continue to
have early sexual intercourse without
any kind of “protection,”
and that the number of pregnancies and
abortions among adolescents has multiplied.
“By
now, it is clear that to avoid these
tragedies it is not enough to explain
to them how they can use contraceptives,
and where to easily find them.”
“The
problem is further upstream,”
she said, “in the family.”
Instead
of throwing condoms at the kids as the
primary defence against their “passions
and mistakes,” Scaraffia believes
that young people should be taught that
sexual life is a “test to be faced
with preparation and seriousness”
and therefore it must be connected to
“life’s fundamental choices
like marriage.”
Sexual
relations are much more than some kind
of “pleasurable exercise”
to be practiced in an unbridled and
risk-free way, she said, but a “meaningful
proof” of one’s human and
spiritual maturity.
New
York’s DOE has yet to unveil its
official sex education curriculum. For
the time, it is recommending that schools
use the existing curriculums HealthSmart
for younger children and Reducing
the Risk for older children.
"For
to me to live is Christ, and to die is
gain." (Phil 1:21)