Editor,
This letter is in response to John Bauer's letter published in the Daily Lobo on Tuesday.
Bauer, please let the rest of us decide what our sexual values are. Your input is certainly fine, but the underlying expectation that we all adopt your values is insulting.
Western Europe does not have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections. The U.S. does have the highest STI rates and the highest teenage and unintended pregnancy rates in the Western world. The difference is that our approach to educating regarding sex is silence, shame and moralistic admonition.
You bring up the amorous evils - liberal human secularism, a dose of welfare state and self-pity - with the same attention to depth and detail that advertisers pay to complex sexuality when trying to sell cosmetics. You are correct that our society is bombarding us with sexual imagery that offers little more than decontextualized, shallow titillation. You are wrong when you assert our schools are "now insanely compelled to challenge our children to ask themselves if they might be gay."
Our teachers are too frightened to include discussions about homosexuality - even as a topic for academic discussion - in their sexual health lessons. That is, if the school in which they work does anything at all to educate regarding sexual health. Our schools are not pushing some phantom gay agenda any more than they are encouraging youth to be sexually active, as so many extremist pundits assert. Sex education in New Mexico schools is essentially nonexistent or is of the incredibly ineffective abstinence-only variety.
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You suggest that "the type of sex education they need, and the only type that can ultimately succeed, must be rooted in moral values." You are wrong. Give the students and their families some credit, please. We, or they, do not need your moral babysitting. They already bring their moral values and their ideas about what's appropriate and right.
What can be done - rather than tell them which set of values to adopt - is provide them with factual information about anatomy, STIs and conception; a range of options regarding prevention such as sexual abstinence, condoms and birth control; some skills development; social context, such as what's it like to be a teenage parent; media literacy; and even values clarification.
Wasn't that easy? We can talk about values without imposing yours. We can provide a range of information so that when folks make up their minds about how they'll behave, they have diverse prevention information to apply, including, but not limited to, sexual abstinence. We can provide opportunity for participants to get perspective on, and practice, a variety of self-advocacy skills.
Or we can continue to apply moralistic, proven-to-be-ineffective, abstinence-only programming. We can just pretend that it'll take care of itself - like it hasn't so far.
Johnny L. Wilson
Planned Parenthood
of New Mexico, Inc.
