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Promoting Intimacy and Other-Centered Sexuality
European Old World Values Are Net-Savvy
The European Parliament has voted 460-0 to oppose the use
of software filters as a way of regulating content on the Internet. As a result,
ISPs will not be forced to restrict access to Web sites that member nations
dislike.
Contrast this with American policy. The U.S. government not only pressures ISPs
to restrict the content they carry, but bludgeons public libraries,
universities, and thousands of other institutions to carry out its policies of
internet censorship.
How could the Europeans be so far ahead of us on this? Do they love their
children less than we do? Are they less intelligent than we are? Do they
understand less about the Internet? Are they less moral, less responsible?
No, they are simply less afraid of sex. And in today's world, that frequently
correlates with more intelligent public policy and personal decision-making.
Fear is never a good teacher, never a good policy guide, and it never leads to
good government--or good parenting. Those who preach fear--the religious right,
pro-censorship pseudo-feminists, misinformed pop psychologists--are the ones we
should be suspicious of.
Imagine: a Parliament that trusts people more than government-imposed
regulation.
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Washington: Abstinence From Thinking on Sex Education
Our federal government appears practically brain-damaged
in its approach to human sexuality.
President Bush, of course, advocates delaying sex until marriage, despite the
fact that neither he, his wife, nor his college age children practiced this.
He's like the guy who wants stricter zoning regulations after he's built his
luxury ranch. Except that Bush is also proposing to spend $138 million to
persuade people to adopt those self-limiting regulations.
It's bizarre that the House debate on funding sex "education" (now abstinence
training) is taking place in the Energy & Commerce Committee. Even more surreal
is the fact that last week, the committee overwhelmingly agreed to spend
$50,000,000 of your money to tell kids not to screw--on the same day that the
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reported it could find "no reliable
evidence" that these abstinence programs work.
Actually, there's plenty of proof that these programs don't work. Over a year
ago (issue #18) we reported that the non-partisan National Campaign to Prevent
Teen Pregnancy evaluated abstinence programs and found them ineffective,
evaluations that the government and others have since replicated.
Now here's the craziest part of it. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) offered an amendment
to the funding bill that would have required abstinence programs receiving
federal money to be scientifically sound--and it failed. Why are legislators
afraid to require this most basic scrutiny? Simple: some 90% of U.S. high school
grads are sexually active--and the government is trying desperately to teach
them not to be. Of course it's failing. They're telling kids not to start doing
something they're already doing.
Abstinence training programs sound exactly like the silliest parts of communism.
I remember a trip to Moscow in 1990, during which I saw salespeople standing
around completely empty department store counters. They went to work and got
paid--because they had jobs. Every time the government threatened to lay them
off, they went on strike, and the government relented. It wanted them on the job
to keep unemployment figures low--even though there was no actual work for
employees to do.
So we have adults who had sex before marriage teaching kids to abstain from sex
before marriage. Twenty years from now, these kids--who are already having sex
before marriage--will be teaching the next generation of kids to abstain before
marriage. And they'll get the same results.
And we laugh at the Soviets trying to keep their unemployment figures down by
hiring salespeople when there's nothing to sell.
Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, ©Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexEd.org)
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