not until you're married?

A while ago Illinois passed a law banning abstinence only education.  This is largely a good thing, abstinence only education doesn’t work.  The research has been done.  You limit your sex education to saying “don’t do it!” and the result is teenagers doing it.  And doing it with less protection than if they’d have had a more comprehensive sex education program.

But I’m feeling a little nostalgic here.  The school system that I attended clearly had a comprehensive sex education policy.  They started on us early, I have vague memories of going on a bus ride during the school day in grade school to some kind of sex education center.  All I remember is sitting in a kind of small theater room and having someone give us the bare bones description of the human reproductive system.

But it’s in high school when the wheels fell off the process for me.  In my high school, our sex education program was combined with a general health class.  So one part of the class focused on sex, the rest on other things, probably everything from drug use to heart disease to how to give oneself a testicular self exam to check for cancer.

My teacher was great for everything else.  But when the sex education part started, he began by informing us that his religion was opposed to having sex before marriage.  He then explained that he was going to tell us not to have sex before marriage, but that he wasn’t doing that because of his religious beliefs..

And then he started to lie to us.  The only thing I remember was giving us grossly inflated condom failure rates to try to convince us that condoms weren’t reliable.

Now that’s bad enough, you dissuade kids from using birth control and, well, they don’t use birth control.  But they still have sex.  But as I’ve thought about it through the years, something else has started to anger me as well.

Where the hell did he get off telling an entire class not to have sex before marriage?  Delaying sexual activity until, well, at least after high school isn’t that bad an idea.  Learning to treat the sex act with an appropriate amount of respect is also a decent idea.  Perhaps being taught to treat your partner with respect would be a good idea too, but somehow that’s never covered.

But avoiding all sex before marriage is risky, not virtuous.  Sexual compatibility is a real thing, people are into different things and sometimes it just doesn’t work out between two people.  To head into marriage completely blind to that, having no idea what you’re into or what the other person is into and just assuming that it’ll all work out is not smart.  Nor, incidentally, is using sex as a motivation to get married.

And there’s one other thing.  I wish I’d thought to challenge that teacher and ask him what a homosexual individual was supposed to do.  This was before gay marriage was legalized anywhere in the United States.  Of course, given that his religion was big on abstinence only then there’s a decent chance it wasn’t big on homosexuality, so his reaction could have been interesting in more than one way.