We Warned You

The Volokh Conspiracy - "Abstinence" becomes "biblical sex only"

Dan Savage has been warning you for a while now in his Savage Love column that, while their anti-gay positions are the ones they advertise, the scaremongers on the far right are really out to repress the entirety of the sexual revolution and, if not criminalize, then marginalize all sexual activity outside a one-man, one-woman marriage. Recently this has meant redefining "abstinence" education to mean "avoidance of sex at any age whatsoever except within the framework of conventional heterosexual marriage." This means that all of you who didn't wait before you got married (and, knowing the readership of the blog pretty well, I think that means just about all of you) have gone (quite understandably, I might add) against what they want to teach in schools.

Now, I understand that sometimes we teach ideals in schools that we know people won't quite live up to. But whose ideals are these? And wouldn't it be more valuable, in a society that has developed as ours has, simply to tell youngsters that high-school age isn't the time for sex? Instead, as Walter Olson puts it in the linked post, "Loads of tax dollars will now be spent in American classrooms to enforce the message that gays and unmarried heterosexuals, no matter how ripe in age, should never have sex at all, no matter how monogamous."

I hope this subtle shift in tone makes big news, because it reveals the far right to which Bush is beholden for what it is--and what it is, and what it aspires for the United States to be, certainly is not what most Americans want for the country.