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A lot of people in the evangelical circles parrot untruths and lies about sex. So schools should give the kids the facts an truth - that STDs are not Gods punishment for sex before marriage, for example.
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The school giving facts doesn’t prevent parents from telling their kids about the values they believe in, enabling kids to make their own decision. You can still tell your children “I believe in waiting till marriage” even if the school tells the facts about STDs.
If your values are right, you don’t need to scare kids with lies about STDs or force them into “abortion is terrible, having unprotected sex means pregnancy, using protection is not possible” impossible situation. -
Schools should teach the values that the laws of this countries state, even and especially if the parents values are against that. That for example it’s not okay for a boy to have sex with a girl and then marry her, or to get a girl by paying a bride price to her father (which is in the Bible, after all).
Schools should also teach that just because a man marries a woman doesn’t give him total right at all times to her body, even if that is against the values of evangelical/ conservative parents, because in many states, finally laws against rape in the marriage have been passed.
Talking about consent at all is already against the values of many evangelical/ conservative parents.
Over at slacktivist, there’s an older article with a link to the “two box” sexual ethics illustration. Bascially, most people agree that sex belongs in two boxes “allowed” and “forbidden”. The difference between atheists/ liberals/ protestants and Catholics/ evangelicals/ conservatives is how the sorting is done:
one side sorts by consent, so “sex with children” is not allowed, but “sex between two adult men” is allowed.
The other side sorts by “God’s law (according to how my group interprets the Bible)”, so “sex with children” and “sex between two adult men” is exactly the same, forbidden, and “sex with my married wife” is allowed, regardless of what she wants right now. (That’s why it took such a long time and push against conservatives to pass laws to persecute rape inside the marriage: for conservatives, marriage grants the man permanent access to the woman; rape is a violation of woman belonging to another man - father or husband).
Teaching about how sex works does not constitute teaching values about when one should actually do it. These are separate concepts.
As for astorian’s analogy, I can break it very easily. I know more sex is for marriage Christians who had sex outside of wedlock than those who didn’t. It’s just something they grow up and get forgiven from. If they thought it was as bad as slavery, that would not work. Slavery is wrong, period.
Also, the idea that fact vs. fake news is subjective is not only not true, but a huge problem. You can very well identify facts vs. opinions. And it’s something that’s quite necessary to learn in school.
Also, there’s the simple fact that the Bible not only doesn’t cover abortions, but also never says sex is only for marriage. There are various words for sex acts that are improper, but these are not actually defined.
And, yes, if you’re a conservative Christian and not a Catholic, that’s important. Because conservative Christianity (except Catholics) is supposed to be sola scriptura.
There’s a reason why my roommate in college, who actually went back to what the Bible said, would not preach that sex outside of marriage was wrong. He could not back that up with a scripture.
Face it–that issue is more political than religious.
Umm yes it can. They are KIDS! They do dumb things!
You watch them like a hawk for their own damn good! You know where they are at all times. You watch their phones. You know when they will be home alone. If they start seeing someone you call that persons parents. Best of all, keep them busy in activities.
A little shame and dose of reality never hurts either. Heck I know of one parent when they found out, contacted the other kids parents, and they took their kids down to the clinic and MADE them get pregnancy and VD tests. Not fun. That cooled their hormones.
Ok, if you want to be that “cool” parent go ahead and let them have sex. BUT, you better have the girl stand in front of you every morning and take her birth control pills.
Now once they are 18 and graduated HS and in college, thats their own lives. Give them any sex ed material to read you want. Buy any BC. But thats when they should be old enough to handle it.
NOT AT 16 and NO DAMN WAY at 14!
BTW, I should add that I’m ok with teaching sex ed in schools as long as parents have the right to look at materials beforehand and I’d rather they keep it focused on biology and mechanics rather than getting into moral issues because everyone has their own morals.
So you had a program at school that said not to drive drunk and yet you did it anyway. The lesson to be learned is that should be a program in school telling kids only to sex with condoms and that will work? Sex is a biological drive, driving drunk is not.
That is not true. This study by the Guttmacher institute shows that Protestants are much less likely to get abortions than the non-religious and that those who go to church more frequently are less likely to have abortions than those who go less frequently,.
The first link contains no evidence.
The increases in condom use in the second link are very small and the studies are poorly controlled for confounders.
The third link is to a study that said boys used condoms more but girls reported no increased usage. That seems off mathematically. Also all data was of self reports which are of questionable reliability.
I know it comforts some people to live a magical world where a couple of pamphlets and a health class can solve complicated problems like teen pregnancy but that is not the world we live in.
How about we figure out which religion has the lowest rate of teen pregnancies and then send the kids to those people to teach sex ed?
I am not living in the dark ages, in 2017 there is the internet and also some kids have parents they can ask.
:smack:
No sigh.
Even as a dumb teen I knew I needed help with choices. An adult gave me a great tool to help with stupidity. I then went to another adult with that tool and gave her a chance to help me. She declined. She should have taken that information, sat me down and had a long, honest talk about what can happen when you’re drunk. You can get raped, fall off a ledge and die, crash your car…
She could have said “underage drinking is wrong, and illegal and you in no way should take part in it. But if you find yourself in a situation where you or your friends have made very bad choices, I will be there for you to keep the situation from getting worse”.
As I said earlier, the simple act of sitting down and talking to me caused me to completely stop getting into trouble.
Had my mom made the right choice and talked to me like I wanted, I likely would have listened to her and not gone drinking at all.
Talking to your kids works. Shutting down communication with “because I said so!” does NOT.
Well, the Hindus have the Kama Sutra, so presumably they know something about sex education. Would you be cool with sending your Christian school children to a Hindu temple to learn all about sex education from them?
The first link is a report by the CDC about how effective these programs have been. The claim that it contains no explicit statistical data is hardly an issue to me; when I see a major medical institution like the CDC (or, for that matter, the AAP) endorsing a policy statement, that qualifies as evidence. Why wouldn’t it? We’re talking about a major medical organization putting their reputation on the line to say, “If we want to solve problem X, we need to do Y.” That said, you missed the “research and development” segment of the article, which does, in fact, contain evidence.
As opposed to not teaching them about condoms, and trying to prevent them from having access to condoms, which will somehow magically convince them to not have sex. Ha ha, very funny. :rolleyes: When it comes to a question of medical science, I’m not going to take the word of a religious conservative rando on a forum over the CDC, AAP, AMA, ANA, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, NIH, WHO, and NAM. There is a reason that abstinence-only sex education got such a drubbing when Bush did it - it doesn’t fucking work.
We agree. Parents talking to kids is how sex education should happen and is the only way it can work. Having some random gym teacher give a semester to sex ed is doomed to fail.
That would depend on what they taught and if it was effective.
Utah has the lowest teen pregnancy rate in the country, would you be cool with sending your kids to Mormons for sex education?
I prefer to read the studies myself rather than outsource my critical thinking to other groups. I was a social science major and have dozens upon dozens of social science studies so I have the background knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff in a way most don’t.
People like to say abstinence education does not work like it means that comprehensive education does. The reality is they both don’t work.
That would depend on what they taught and if it was effective.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love reading some meaty studies. When my friends started sharing anti-GMO articles, I went straight to the source and checked out the peer-reviewed studies they were based on. It was really informative (of how much of a lying shitweasel Seralini is, at least).
But when it comes to sussing out the overall trends in the literature, and the general position of most experts on a subject, single studies tend not to do the trick. In fact, they can often obscure the bigger picture, if the studies chosen are unrepresentative or outliers - and even if they aren’t, you often end up missing the forest for the trees. Something you’ve done quite impressively, I might add.
That’s why it’s useful to be able to turn to the kind folks at the AAP (or AMA, or APA, and so on) and say, “Hey, you’re a massive medical group representing tens of thousands of doctors. You have your own high-impact-factor medical journal. You make authoritative policy statements speaking for your tens of thousands of extremely qualified members based on what you see as the best available evidence, knowing that if you’re wrong and your members know it, it will permanently damage your reputation. What do you think about issue X?”
And then you damn well listen, because if anyone has a firm grasp on this subject and an interest in giving it to you straight, it’s these guys. It saves me the trouble of reading all the available literature, which I would first have to find, then analyzing the various studies with different results and coming to my own conclusions about what it all means. This, by the way, is the kind of task that constitutes real work for trained scientists - writing metareviews is not exactly an “Oh, I’ll finish it up in a few days” endeavor, last I checked.
Also, on a side note:
For people looking for the forest, rather than the trees, Cochrane is pretty fucking on point most of the time.
And one important quote (pay attention, folks who think giving condoms to kids is a bad idea:
If it is effective why does it matter what they are being taught?
Two more studies that show sex education does not work.
So, let me get this right - It a program is not 100% effective, it is 100% ineffective? 'Cause if that’s your stance, then your statment makes sense.
If, on the other hand, if a program of less than 100% effictiveness still changes behaviors in significant numbers of persons, then your statement is false.