Teen sex and abstinence education

A summary from US News and World Report about debates over abstinence-only curricula. It’s slanted against them, of course, but does include a fair amount of material from more than one side. A basic problem is the scientific-social-policy approach that makes it possible for the Pennsylvania congressman to call the abstinence approach “a case of substituting rigid, untested ideology for well-tested and scientifically defensible measurements of how young people behave … It’s insanity. It’s nuts.” Under the congressman’s approach manipulation becomes everything and even the possibility of morality disappears. Another problem is the piecemeal nature of the analysis—what happens if we spend $135 million on this and leave everything else just as it is? Not a lot, of course, when the problem is so extensive.

What do we need to do to get ourselves out of this hole?

4 thoughts on “Teen sex and abstinence education”

  1. Republican House member
    Republican House member James Greenwood’s description of a program promoting sexual abstinence, i.e, traditional morality, as “a case of substituting rigid, untested ideology for well-tested and scientifically defensible measurements of how young people behave” shows how modernity with its technological organization of human life has not just replaced traditional morality, it has become traditional morality. Under the rule of modernity, it is traditional morality that is seen as an “ideology,” because it hasn’t been subjected to the only criterion of truth recognized by modernity—“scientific” tests that make people’s OBSERVED behavior the sole STANDARD of behavior.

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  2. There’s something to that.
    There’s something to that. It’s views like this – which I think are plainly antihuman – that make Greenwood a “moderate Republican.”

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  3. To continue the above point,
    To continue the above point, under the world view of modernity, it is now “traditional common sense” to see human beings as soulless entities whose behavior is entirely controlled by hormones, and human society as an instrument for managing that behavior according to the best scientific principles that exclude any notion of morality. At the same time, as science has become tradition, the once traditional view—that man has a soul and can choose between the better and the worse—has become a “rigid, untested ideology.”

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  4. Furthermore, this reversal
    Furthermore, this reversal of positions between the traditional moral view and the amoral scientistic view has developed in tandem with all the other moral and cultural inversions that characterize today’s dominant liberal culture, such as homosexuality being honored while the Boy Scouts are ostracized for not having openly homosexual Scout Masters; such as suicide bombers being supported by the UN Human Rights Commission while people defending themselves from suicide bombers are demonized; such as an unrepentant racial slanderer such as Al Sharpton being made into a national political figure, while white reporters making factual observations about negative behaviors of blacks are fired. This is the “radical mainstream” that liberalism has produced. It still maintains the form of mainstream, bourgeois, civilized society, and so avoids the sort of principled opposition that Communism would elicit; but in its moral and cultural content it is unimaginably radical and nihilistic.

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