August 19, 2014
While the Sexual Revolution was overthrowing American traditions of morality, sexual chastity, marriage, and temperance, the “Sex Ed” revolution that was quietly taking hold in public schools.
One of the tactics Progressives use to weaken individuality is to strip away the traditions that moor us to our familial, religious, and national identities. Without such moorings, people tend to drift on whatever winds of social change prevail.
The most crucial traditions are those we learn first, as children. Family traditions such as holiday celebrations, religious observances, rites of passage, and structured interactions such as reunions and vacations, help form solid identities and a sense of security in children. But the most important of all traditions are moral traditions such as service, work ethic, honesty, faith, prayer, charity, love, modesty, chastity, and proper parental guidance in relationships and sexuality.
Progressivism, with its affinity for powerful government and powerless citizens, went for the throat of American morality, first by persuading women to abandon their identities as mothers and wives, and then by supplanting parental instruction in the sacred topics of sexuality and marriage with “Sex Ed” in public schools.
Although early in the 20th Century the National Education Association (NEA), a progressive teacher’s union, began pushing for sexuality education in public schools, the trend did not become widespread until the early 1960’s. While the Sexual Revolution was overthrowing American traditions of morality, sexual chastity, marriage, and temperance, the “Sex Ed” revolution that was quietly taking hold in public schools. Though less visible and dramatic than the Sexual Revolution, the Sex Ed Revolution nevertheless laid a progressive foundation that would ensconce social experimentation where the nuclear family once reigned as the key institution of civil society. And some six decades following the Sex Ed Revolution, childhood itself is unrecognizable from what my generation knew as years of innocence and safety when parents stood as a bulwark against all the scary, harmful things of the world.
During the the last decades of the 20th Century, the Silent Majority, complacent with prosperity and confident in public institutions, dozed as progressive theories and materials were infused into all subject areas taught public schools. American History was corrupted with what Dinesh D’Souza calls the “shaming of America.” American traditions and celebrations were diluted by multiculturalism, and reproductive biology– Sex Ed–became a backdoor for sexualization, and sexual activism, condom worship, and the gutting of moral traditions for children as young as the K-5 crowd.
Bill Clinton, bless his perverted little heart, for all his shenanigans finally awoke Americans to the impact public figures and policy have on our culture. When, during the Lewinsky brouhaha, middle schoolers started having oral sex on campus and saying “it’s not really sex” the dots were connected, and parents woke up and began to pay attention to what was being taught to their children in the schools which, for decades, they trusted and deemed wholesome. But the poison seeped in, little by little:
- The AIDS scare of the 1980’s brought forth condoms and “safe sex” as the best and only answer to the spread of HIV, and all the confusion and fear that came with it. Condoms, placed on a pedestal as the cultural symbol of safe sex, were introduced into schools in the early 1990’s, distributed in middle and high schools by 1995, and made part of early childhood curricula by the 2000’s. Youngsters’ exposure to mock (and real) male genitalia, and sexual intercourse resulted in the stripping away of natural modesty that most kids have as an innate shield to innocence. Sex was relegated to be a joke, a pastime, a sport, a “release,” and in the minds of vulnerable young people, lost its value as the bonding act of marriage and the essential and sacred act of procreation.
- Pop culture has objectified teenagers as hyper-sexual creatures, for whom sexplay is the driving force behind everything they do. Progressive education teaches children that early sex is all right as long as you have a condom and the boy doesn’t become a rapist in the process. With no regard for the physical, emotional, or spiritual damage done by early pre-marital sex, or the cultural dangers it poses as both boys and girls are objectified as sex partners first, and humans second, movies, television, teen magazines, websites, chat rooms, and even some misguided parents fostered amorality and the resulting lack of understanding of and respect for commitment, marriage, family and the proper order for them all.
- Entertainment targeting teens and tweens glorifies promiscuity, bizarre sexual relationships, and extreme depravity (including rape) as the be all, end all of youthful aspirations while minimizing the value of boys and girls and men and women as individuals and mocking traditional, biologically-rooted roles. From MTV, which offers little more than offensive reality shows with a parade of reckless, perverted, sexually repugnant teenagers as role models, to Grand Theft Auto which legitimizes violence and rape in stomach-turning scenarios that deaden the senses and kill compassion, children are becoming increasingly isolated from the safety, tenderness, and respect that once defined romance.
- All progressive social movements; Feminism, Socialism, LGBT Culture, Atheism of necessity function according to the laws of situational morality. In moral world where truth dictates law and law dictates justice, progressivism falls apart, so naturally its advocates try to convince people that there is no good nor evil, no absolute moral authority, no God. Public schools, the entertainment industry, the Internet, and media have spoon-fed American children the rationalizations that defy traditional mores. When there are no absolutes (“define what “is” is”) children lacking a moral measuring stick against which to judge behavior become prey to any adult with an agenda which seeks to exploit them. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is the perfect example of this. Planned Parenthood’s policy of the non-reporting of incest, statutory rape, and attack rape is made possible because children have learned that their bodies are not sacred, and sex is just another thing that happens. Though Progressives often use “it’s for the children” as a lie in which to couch their big government agenda, it is children that suffer most when their policies are implemented.
- Divorce sometimes results in exposure to sexual abuse, or sexually inappropriate behavior by adults. Though individual divorces are not necessarily based on sexual immorality or other indiscretions, the absence of family structure resulting from it often leads to early sexualization of the affected children. Sexual and physical abuse of children is often at the hands of live-in boyfriends of divorced moms. Divorce has longer-term implications as well. It’s no accident that fewer and fewer young adults are choosing not to marry. Experience has taught many that marriage will inevitably lead to divorce, and they wrongly believe that it was the marriage itself that devastated their young hearts. Our current social welfare system also discourages marriage, and rewards women for having multiple children out of wedlock, often by multiple men. The tangent of community decay that results is correlated to generational poverty, learning problems, drug abuse, alcoholism, chronic unemployment, juvenile crime and imprisonment.
- Pornographic and perverted Sex-Ed texts, if not stopped by the outcries of parents in local school districts are making their way into classes as early as 5th grade. Graphic illustrations of naked models in various states of sexual arousal, sex acts including lesbianism, homosexuality and bisexuality, and masturbation have been approved by may state and local school boards across the country. The texts include: Your Health Today, It’s Perfectly Normal, Heather has Two Mommies, Daddy’s Roomate
It’s impossible to tease out every cause of childhood early or hyper-sexualization, but one thing is clear; the culture no longer supports good parenting and strong families, and in many ways actively fights against the first and last bastions of character in America. There are answers, however, and they lie in individual responsibility. Strong families and safe children are made possible by faith, proper parenting, awareness and supervision, and self-reliance. Moral virtue still stands as a bulwark against misery and national decline, but our culture no longer supports these things and in many ways parents have little to trust other than God Himself to help them fight the war to save their children.
Next in the series, The War on Childhood: Debt
by Marjorie Haun 8/19/14
