You oppose safe-sex education? So you think premarital sex is a sin?
This is always the response I get from people when I criticize safe-sex education. They will equate questioning the current methods of safe-sex education with condemning sex before marriage.
This thinking is 100 percent wrong.
In light of recent news that the University of New Hampshire is going to start selling condoms in vending machines on campus, let’s get one thing out the way: the fact that you oppose the current safe-sex education methods pushed forth today by activists, school boards, academics and university health service organizations by no means is making a value judgment on premarital sex.
However, it is most definitely making a value judgment on the wisdom of contemporary safe-sex educators.
First things first: A discussion about premarital sex should be left to parents, children, clergymen, mentors and doctors. Because sex is something not to be taken lightly, it should be discussed in private, personal settings in which students should have complete trust in the person they are talking to and getting information from.
Believing in private settings to facilitate mature and serious discussions about sex is wholly different than questioning the ways educators promote safe-sex practices nowadays.
This leads us to the recent decision by UNH’s Senate Health and Human Services Council to allow the selling of condoms in all residential hall vending machines. Council Chair Julie Rocco reasoned, “What if a student wants to have sex and the [resident assistant] isn't in the building, has just run out of condoms or the student doesn't feel comfortable asking the RA for a condom? Having the condoms in the vending machines allows students to still practice safe sex in those situations.”
This comment strikes at the heart of what is wrong with the current thinking of safe-sex educators today: it removes the responsibility and independence of both students and parents to make their own decisions about sexual activity.
Instead of empowering students to carefully consider the decision to have sex, safe-sex educators substitute their own preconceived notions of sex and encourage students to behave how safe-sex educators want them to behave.
Case in point: Roccos’s hypothetical statement about a student who wants to have sex but is burdened by the lack of available condoms from the RA. Rocco’s thinking suggests that she would like for the student to have sex that particular night, as long as he wants to – and uses a condom, of course.
How about this revelation: Perhaps the student should not have sex that night if he himself did not take the necessary precautions beforehand to prepare himself for a situation in which he may want to have sex.
Such precautions may have included buying condoms from a store or heading to UNH’s Health Services to obtain one.
This distinction may seem trivial, but it reflects the most powerful aspect of what is wrong with the safe-sex mindset today. It discourages independent thinking and action from students to make their own autonomous decisions about sex without being influenced by safe-sex educators.
It removes responsibility from students by suggesting that sex is purely an act of free will for pleasure and that a student should, without a second thought, engage in such an act whenever he wants to, as long as he uses protection. It also assumes, of course, that “it’s a reality that teenagers and college students have sex.”
This is a convenient perception of reality from people with personal agendas to advance. Here is a more accurate reality: some students do engage in sex and some do not. Some wait before marriage and others don’t.
The point is that this insensitive assumption by safe-sex educators dismisses the possibility that students do, in fact, have the capability to educate themselves about sex without needing assistance from public campaigns pushing condom usage and safe-sex education classes.
They do, in fact, have the courage to talk to their parents, clergymen or doctors about sex –everyone who has a serious and personal relationship with the student at a level that safe-sex educators and school board members will never approach.
And they do, in fact, have the strength to resist calls from safe-sex educators to engage in casual sex as long as it is protected sex.
As much as safe-sex educators would like to assume that safe-sex education does not promote a casual sex agenda, a look at the facts suggests otherwise. The utter failure of safe-sex education in the 1960s to reduce venereal diseases and out-of-wedlock births is the most conspicuous example of the decision-making capacity of sexual activity shifting from the home, the church and the doctor’s office to the school, the politically connected activists and some selfish administrators.
That’s what is happening right now at UNH.
That is not to say that premarital sex is or is not evil, but it is to say that safe-sex educators should seriously reconsider the purpose of sex education.
Greg Collins is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at gcollins@student.umass.edu.
