Sex Education, pt. I

¡Hola mi Gente!
If you want to get a good idea of how the rich and powerful exert their influence, you need go no further than a local mall. What free-thinking, intelligent person would camp overnight to buy something they don’t need with money they don’t really have? BTW: Isn't it ironic that it’s okay to camp out on public or private property as long as you spend a shitload of money in the morning, but may the Consumer GOD have mercy on your soul if you're camping out to express a political idea?

Never mind… go back to sleep.

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The War on Children: Sex Education in America, pt. I

I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.

–Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on the HPV vaccine, Fox News interview, Sept. 12, 2011

I know that you wouldn’t want your child to cross the street until they understood the rules and the dangers of such an activity. Yet, sex education in America today is a lot like telling your kid to never cross the street without letting them the know the dangers and arming them with the information necessary should they ever find themselves having to cross a street. Check that: adults in America are waging an anti-sex campaign in which we’re pushing our children into a no-man’s land full of hidden mines.

It’s obscene.

And the adults in this country repeatedly claim they’re doing this in the name of children’s safety. For the children, for the children… they repeat over and over.

The battle over sex education, however, isn’t about what’s safe or healthy for children. It’s about what’s comfortable for seriously sexually repressed adults. In the War on Sex, it’s the children who are the victims. The welfare of our children is being sacrificed so that religious fanatics to inject their beliefs into the structure of our government. The safety of our children is being sacrificed so that adults can feel better about themselves. It should be, of course, the other way around.

The battle over sex education is the battle over childhood and adolescent sexuality. Our government, controlled by corporations and their right-wing authoritarian pawns, has set a clear, tragic, and dangerous challenge: Preventing young people from having sexual experiences and ignoring their health needs as they do.

They’re forcing kids to join them in an unholy crusade to deny sexuality -- in the process creating a toxic synergy of teaching kids to fear sexual feelings, while adults fear sexual information. They’ve put kids on the frontlines of the War on Sex as shields and demanding they patrol a toxic landscape of a cultural conflict.

And they’re doing this with your money. Anti-sex educators were awarded more than $200 million in funding in 2006 alone, in every state in the nation. Abstinence-only-until-marriage has been taught in more than half of American public schools and most private schools. Probably in your kid’s school.

Meanwhile, regardless of what parents do or say, the overwhelming majority of today’s kids pledging abstinence are going to have sex before they marry (duh) -- unless, of course, their parents can do away with TV, the internet, eliminate cell phones, bomb the fashion industry, and manage to shackle their kids to underground bunkers.

And so what we’re left with is millions of children being systematically prepared for what they won’t experience: adolescence and young adulthood without sex. Of course, that also means that they’re being systematically being unprepared for what they will have: sex, sexual feelings, sexual relationships, sexual decision-making.

In the following weeks, I will be addressing the various issues embedded in this War on Sex and the harm it’s doing to our children.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…