A while back we heard about the United Nations pact that would prohibit parents from choosing their children’s religion. Now the UN is issuing another dystopian proposal, a sex-education curriculum that would teach children as young as five about masturbation and “gender roles, stereotypes and gender-based violence.” And those are just two elements in a 98-page report issued by the UN’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and which includes curricula for children between the ages of 5 and 18. Joseph Abrams at FoxNews reports, writing:
Under the U.N.’s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation” and that private parts “can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself.”
. . . By the time they’re 9 years old, they’ll learn about “positive and negative effects of ‘aphrodisiacs,” and wrestle with the ideas of “homophobia, transphobia [prejudice against transsexuals] and abuse of power.”
At 12, they’ll learn the “reasons for” abortions — but they’ll already have known about their safety for three years. When they’re 15, they’ll be exposed to direct “advocacy to promote the right to and access to safe abortion.”
As to the last point, UNESCO promotes “the right to and access to safe abortion” for everyone over 15 years of age.
Well, now it’s clear why the UN doesn’t want parents to be able to choose their children’s religion. I mean, we wouldn’t want to impose values on the kids, after all.
The UNESCO report is entitled “International Guidelines for Sexuality Education” and is co-authored by a sociologist named Doug Kirby and one Nanette Ecker, a sex educator at the Nassau County chapter of Planned Parenthood, and they and its other boosters would claim that it’s needed to help combat AIDS. Yet it’s hard to see how this is anything but a sales pitch. How will teaching children about masturbation, transphobia, the “therapeutic” effects of abortion, and the “gender” agenda reduce the spread of HIV? In point of fact, even the theory that widespread condom use — something hailed by libertines as a veritable panacea — reduces the incidence of AIDS is full of holes (read “Harvard Academic: Pope is Right about Condoms“).
Yet the main problem with this sex-education proposal, as with them all, is not in the details but in the concept of sex education itself. As time wears on, we teach children more and more about sex at younger and younger ages, yet the effect is the precise opposite of that intended: sex-related social ills seem to increase commensurately with the carnal knowledge children are given. As to this, just consider that while the out-of-wedlock birthrate was only 3.8 percent in 1940, today it is 40 percent.
Nevertheless, we keep administering the medicine even as the patient grows ever more ill, unwilling to consider the remedies used when he was healthy because, well, old, forgotten mistakes fancied novel and new are so much more alluring than the tried and true. It much reminds me of the great G.K. Chesterton quotation, “Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” And if we do look back we will see the answer to dealing with man’s libido very clearly. It lies not in psychology textbooks or Kinsey Institute faux science, not in “comprehensive” sex education or even in abstinence-only programs. It lies in recreating a chaste society.
What is a chaste society? I wrote about this in January (an audio presentation can be found here) and explained it thus:
Chastity, mind you, is not synonymous with celibacy; rather, it refers to a state in which sexuality is kept within its proper context. This means within marriage and not reduced to simply the most popular form of recreation or a central ingredient of entertainment. In such a society, there are no “programs” for sexuality; in fact, that we think of targeting such a thing with programs hints at the problem. What if I told you that we needed a “program” to teach people about the proper acquisition of goods because large numbers of citizens thought they had just as much a right to others’ belongings as to their own? Of course, in certain times and places such a thing might actually and quite regrettably be necessary. However, it would not even be a thought in a land where virtually all were instilled with “Thou shalt not steal” as children. If there is need of a program to address what should be woven into the culture, it means that the civilization is already far gone.
The truth is that in a healthy nation, the whole society is a sexuality program, in just the same way it’s a courtesy, reverence, anti-theft, anti-murder program and every other kind of program. In a nutshell, it’s a comprehensive virtue program. Such a place has strong traditions and social codes governing sexuality, with special emphasis placed where it’s most needed — on the young. This social governance includes powerful stigmas attached to undesirable practices and covers the who, what, where, why and how of the heart’s desire.
This is the vision of an ideal, one that had been successfully attempted in the past. Sure, we are very far from it today, but not because, as is consensus now, the ideal is unrealistic or even impossible. That is a cop-out. The truth is that people won’t look back to what actually worked because they so look forward to free sex. You see, the real remedy has one tragic defect: it would spoil their fun. It is thus scoffed at and called antiquated, but as Chesterton also wrote:
One of the first things that are wrong [with the world] is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
Yet while we’re sure that you can’t recreate the past’s glories, we also speak of looking to the future. And it isn’t just that we look to it with hope; we also sometimes act as if looking forward is a substitute for looking back for wisdom. But the problem with looking to the future is obvious: there is nothing to look at. The future cannot be a guide because we simply don’t know what it will be. The future will be molded by us; it cannot mold us. It is the past from which we can learn, just as that icon of modernity the scientist does. A scientist will be mindful of experiments performed in the past because he needs to know what worked and what didn’t so as to avoid repeating mistakes. And if a scientist claimed he was looking toward the experiments of the future, he would be crazy — as crazy as our social scientists.
Thus, the reality is that anyone who laughs at the past and looks to the future when formulating policy is a fool. He is looking at nothing. He is rejecting accumulated knowledge. He is simply proceeding based on what feels right at the moment. And what feels right at the moment — at any moment, in fact — is free sex. Yet, in reality, there is no such thing as free sex. There is always a price to be paid.
