Abstinence-only sex "education": just another authoritarian idea

What are the goals of sex education? First, we want our children to understand themselves and their bodies more accurately. Second, as a result of that education, we seek to prevent our children from suffering. That is, we hope that the things they learn will prevent sexually transmitted disease, and will keep them from being parents before they are ready.

The goals of the abstinence-only approach are ostensibly the same, but are they really? Too often, the teaching of abstinence is done without actually imparting any information whatsoever. Keep the child ignorant in the hope that ignorance of sexual matters will keep him/her from indulging in sex. The child might just as well not be in class at all.

We know for a fact that, since the beginning of humanity, teenage hormones have made it nearly impossible for the young person to resist sex, no matter how strongly they or their families believe they ought to. Over and over again, the sex drive wins over good sense.

A good sex education course, aimed at the minimization of unhappy accidents, takes this reality into account. Abstinence-only sex education merely attempts to overcome the urges that are natural, and the outcome is very often not the desired one. We know, because we can count, that in areas with abstinence-only programs, out-of-wedlock pregnancies happen more often than when children have good information; the same is true with STDs.

Faced with these facts, proponents of abstinence-only education persist in their practices. This makes me wonder about their real motives. Do they really, out of love for their children, want to give them a better life? Because what they're doing fails miserably.

I wonder whether their real motive is a desire for strict obedience to their parental authority. Well, even so, they fail to achieve that, too.

Protecting our bathrooms from Republican legislators

State governments with Republican majorities are passing laws designed to keep transgender people from using the bathrooms they belong in. They want to prevent girls from the predations of... of whom? Ex-boys?

Aside from missing the obvious truth that, once a male undergoes sexual reassignment, he's no longer a male, some of our Republican legislators are once again displaying behavior that fascinates me.

Many of our ardent Christians are horrified at the idea of a world without God. Wide-eyed, they say that, without the threat of God's punishment, anything goes. To such people, the only reason to be good is to avoid punishment. Never mind that, every day, people go about doing good and avoid doing wrong without any thought of punishment avoidance. Asked if, were there no God, would they transgress, many Christians say they would.

Now, this always puzzles me, since my assumption would be that a Christian, by definition, would voluntarily be in favor of doing good and opposed to doing evil. Yet, some of these people admit that, if they thought nobody was watching, they would run wild.

I was reminded of this when Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), said this in defense of bathroom laws:

When it comes to this current legislation where — in most of the world, in most of the religions, the major religions, you have men and you have women, and there are some abnormalities but for heaven’s sake, I was as good a kid as you can have growing up, I never drank alcohol till I was legal, never to, still, use an illegal drug, but in the seventh grade if the law had been that all I had to do was say, "I’m a girl," and I got to go into the girls’ restroom, I don’t know if I could’ve withstood the temptation just to get educated back in those days.

And Tennessee State Representative Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin) is an interesting case as well. Rep. Durham is a cosponsor of an anti-transgender bathroom bill. It turns out that Rep. Durham is more dangerous to women than the people he claims to be defending women from.

Last week, Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell exiled state Rep. Jeremy Durham from his offices at the War Memorial Building and limited his access to other areas after Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued a warning that the lawmaker’s behavior posed “a continuing risk to unsuspecting women who are employed by or interact with the legislature.”

I'm going to indulge in some amateur psychoanalysis here. Durham is being investigated for multiple sexual harassment incidents, according to interviews with 34 women by the Tennessee Attorney General's office. I would say that Durham is lacking in self-control and is perhaps terrified of his own inability to control his urges--and he projects that fear onto transgender people.

Today's far-right Republican is (has always been, I suppose) an authoritarian, and a product of authoritarians. A dictatorial father decides what behavior is acceptable or, perhaps more to the point, unacceptable, and he lays down the law. Under those conditions, always controlled by an angry father or an angry God, how does a child develop self-control? Often, he or she doesn't.

Then the authoritarian goes out into the world and dedicates himself or herself to making other human beings miserable.

Adding a layer of usefulness to the roof

It's heartening to see so many roofs in my neighborhood with new solar power installations. I mentioned a while back that some vested interests are actively trying to prevent the growth of the solar industry. Part of the satisfaction is seeing these people lose. The rest is optimism for a better world.