The Friday Sex Blog [The War Against Chidren]

Hola mi Gente…

Unless you’re living under a rock (or had your cable unplugged due to non-payment J ), you have heard of the armed, right-wing, white extremists – the same demographic named as the most dangerous threat on U.S. soil by those pesky libruhls at the FBI – have taken over federal property in Oregon (for the basics about this, click here). 

As many have already pointed out, if it had been Black, Latin@s, or First Nation people they would’ve been dead by now. What’s more, the chattering class have done their best to portray this armed insurrection as just a bunch of good ole boys acting up. Shoot, 30 years ago, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a black liberation group, in the process destroying a whole city block, killing women and children, and displacing hundreds. And, of course, there is the crime committed against Tamir Rice, a young boy who was holding a toy gun.

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

Repression is not morality.

I assume that you wouldn’t want your child to cross the street until they understood the rules and the dangers of traffic. Yet, sex education in America today is a lot like telling a 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 navigate traffic. 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 caterwaul incessantly.

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 children is being sacrificed so that religious fanatics can 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 hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into this war chest, 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. Most lilely, it is being taught 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 are 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 near future, I hope to 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… 

Resources

Klein, M. (2012) America's war on sex: The continuing attack on law, lust, and liberty.

Levine, J. (2003) Harmful to minors: The perils of protecting children from sex.

Labels: human sexuality, sex education, sexual repression