Sex Education has been a controversial and politically charged subject since its inception. The conservative Right argues that we should teach abstinence until marriage exclusively, arguing that teaching safe sexual practices will encourage teens to have sex. The liberal Left wants to encourage safe sexual practices, while ignoring the fact that the only truly safe sex is no sex. Both sides have good points, but they both have made a ton of mistakes.
The main reason there is a controversy with sex education is that the two major sides have different goals, and they seem to deliberately exclude the goal of the other side from their own platform. For example, it would be trivial to include a short "but if you do have sex, use protection" in a more conservative leaning sex ed class, and it would be equally easy to include a "but all protection has a chance of failure, so the only guarantee is complete abstinence" to a liberal sex ed curriculum. The main difference in goals is that for the Right, sex ed is all about morality. In fact, conservative sex ed activist groups appear to care exclusively about the morality issue, without any concern at all for the goal of the other side. For the left, the main goal is health. This is certainly as noble a goal as morality, but in their haste to entirely exclude any conversation on morality at all, they also miss a huge section of other issues, some very closely related to health. In their attempts to deliberately exclude the views of the other side, both sides are making our sexual education in the U.S. stink. Ironically, teen sex rates are actually dropping, so we are doing something right.
Morality and health are both essential issues when it comes to sex education. This is not just about whether or not it is appropriate to have sex with someone you are not marries to, and it is also not just about physical health, but this stupid argument has pushed out everything except these extremely narrow focuses. In fact, there may be a link between some of the sex related issues we are seeing a lot today and the extremely narrow scope of our sex education classes.
Morality is an essential issue in sex education on a number of levels. The surface issue is sex outside of marriage. Ignoring religious issues, there are a number of scientifically supported reasons for limiting sex to committed and legally binding relationships. Ironically, around half of these are health related. Many of these stem from the fact that people who have sex outside of marriage are many times more likely to get divorced. In addition, the younger a person becomes sexually active, the more likely they are to get divorced at some point. Failure of a committed relationship almost always results in mental health issues, and mental health issues are linked to shorter lifespans. Some people now days attempt to substitute legal marriage with non-binding verbal agreements. These do not make a suitable alternative, and they often result in significant long term stress for one or both people (women are far more likely to be affected by this than men). This kind of stress has been very strongly linked to significantly decreased lifespan. These are health issues! If the Left really cares so much about health, why do they leave this part out? It goes further though. The essential moral issues are not exclusively about health. What about rape? What about pretty much anything related to consent? Sex ed classes don't typically bother teaching about the law. The Right does not teach about the law, because abstinence should cover that, right? The truth is, the Left is right that some teens will have sex even if you teach abstinence, and if you don't teach them morals, it is partially your fault when they molest or rape someone! The Left is so caught up in avoiding anything that even looks like morals that they deliberately ignore this as well. There is also emotional science that shows that the oxytocin release during sex causes women to become emotionally attached to their partners, and this is linked to abusive relationships. Emotional attachment is the reason that battered women rarely leave their abusers. This is both a moral and health issue, and both sides are completely ignoring it. And the reason they are ignoring it is that it straddles the line between health and morality, and so neither side is willing to touch it. The mental and emotional effects of sex have been carefully studied, but we are just giving teens condoms or telling them sex is evil, and then walking away. Honestly, the mental and emotional effects of sex are probably more important than moral or health implications, and if we can help teens to understand them, the moral and health implications will be a lot less important.
Health is also a serious issue when it comes to sex. There are plenty of STDs going around. Unwanted pregnancy is, honestly, a travesty. Teen parents are also a serious problem. Again, there is plenty of scientific research showing that having two parents, and at the risk of being politically incorrect, two parents of different physical sex, has the best chances for raising mentally and emotionally healthy and stable children (before anyone starts throwing fruit, this is proven science, and further, the science shows that two parents of the same gender are still better than a single parent or no parents at all). Abortion is wasteful, and it is awfully hard to argue that it is not pretty close to murder without looking like a heartless jerk. Abstinence is the pinnacle of health, when it comes to sex (ignoring the fact that pregnancy actually increases lifespan...). There is no other birth control plan that is 100% effective, aside from removing certain sex organs entirely, and there is no other STD prevention plan that is 100% effective. Abstinence should be taught in every sex education class, ideally with plenty of data on failure rates of other options. That said, the Left is right about one thing: Some teens are going to have sex regardless of what they are taught. Look at the history of humanity. There have been many cultures where the penalty for pre-marital sex was death, and it still happened. History is rife with examples of young lovers having sex before they were married, with a huge variety of consequences, nearly all of which were far worse than getting an STD or getting pregnant. If the death penalty cannot prevent teen sex, how can anyone delude themselves into thinking an "abstinence only" program will be successful? And if the goal is to teach morality, is it really moral to think that it is better that these teens have babies or get STDs than use condoms? Of course, when it comes to health, it is also important to consider the above mentioned health related morality issues, otherwise you are shortchanging the students, not to mention lying to them about the safety of the various forms of birth control. If we really care about the health of our teens, we won't arbitrarily ignore issues merely because there is an element of morality in them. We will cover every health issue, without any concern for whether it treads on the feet of the other side or not.
The ideal sex education course should cover a lot more than what we currently cover. It should discuss things like privacy. It should discuss the concept of virtual, from the perspective of what society might think of a person who's nude image is posted all over the internet. It should discuss what is legal, what is not, and why, even if the why requires a conversation on morality. It should discuss birth control and STD control measures, as well as their failure rates. It should pointedly mention that no birth control and no STD control is more effective then abstinence. It should discuss the mental, emotional, and biological effects of sex, as well as the long term consequences and risks associated with them. This should include some discussion of how sexual relationships without legally binding long term commitment affect people, as well as some discussion on how pre-marital sex affects divorce rates and the emotional effects of divorce on parents and children. At least the Right and Left can agree that a sex education program like this covers things that none of them are comfortable teaching teenagers, but when it comes down to it, if we want to have informed teens who are armed with everything they should know about sex before they actually start doing it, this is what it is going to take.
This kind of sex ed course would cover a lot of inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. Perhaps some on the Left do not want to talk about morality because they are afraid it will condemn their own behavior. If that is the case get over it! This stuff is supported by science. You want to complain about global warming and anti-vax people? Accept science or don't it's not a potluck where you get to pick and choose. People on the Right are pretty clear that their agenda is to deliberately leave teens uninformed so that they will fear pre-marital sex (or, perhaps, just sex in general; there are actually people who have such severe anxiety about sex that even once they are married, they struggle with it, and every last one of these people is someone who was essentially taught that sex is morally wrong). Honestly, this is stupid. Read above and you will see that the truth is plenty scary as it is. If the death penalty is not scary enough to stop teens from having sex, nothing is. Get over, and recognize that the health of your children is at stake here. Leading into the next part, if you are worried that a sex ed class in a public school is going to give your kid ideas that he or she will then act upon, perhaps the problem is that you are not confident in your parenting skills?
Now that we have discussed sex ed in public schools, we should take a look at where sex ed is most effective: The home. Many on the Left claim that the morality of sex should be taught in the home, and they are right. What they are wrong about is when they follow that up with, "no in schools." This is a mistake that bit the business education field in rear end really bad a few decades ago. We had a series of serious ethics problems pop up in enormous businesses, including Enron. Business schools realized from this that ethics is an essential topic to cover in schools. A few decades later, most business schools include ethics classes. It is certainly true that parents should teach their children sexual morality at home, but the fact is it doesn't always work that way! Parents should definitely have the first say in what kind of morality they teach their children, but when it comes to such an important topic as sex, we need more than that. If we are going to have Sex Education classes in the first place, they should actually educate about sex, not just about a very narrow part of the topic. In addition, the relationship between health and morality is very strong with sex. It is literally impossible to do a good job of teaching about sexual health at the same time as avoiding all talk of morality. If we cannot teach sexual morality in the classroom, then maybe we are better off not having sex ed classes at all, because at least then parents won't feel like the school is relieving them of any responsibility for teaching about sex. The fact is, parents are not perfect, and when it comes to a topics as important as sex, this is a huge deal. The fact is someone needs to do it. For a civilized country, we have a lot of rapes and other sexual crimes happening in colleges and universities across the country. It is clear that leaving sexual morality exclusively to the parents is a bad idea. And worse, these problems are spreading STDs and causing unwanted pregnancies. Morality is a sexual health problem. You cannot educate people effectively on sexual health without bring morality into it. It is impossible.
We need the Left and the Right to wake up and take responsibility for the problems that their shortsightedness and narrow mindedness are causing. We need to start including real science in sexual education. We need people to get over their personal vices and teach the truth and the full truth, no matter how condemning they might feel it is to their own life choices. We need people to actually care about teens, instead of punishing them to excess for their indiscretions and allowing them to harm others. If you really care about these people teach them the full truth and let God deal with their punishment, if they so deserve it.
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