How American Christianity Perpetuates: Reason #2
Robert McClenahan, Sexual Empowerment Coach Amy Jo Goddard questions the status quo at TEDxNapaValley 2014, Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Reason #2: It’s Embedded in Sex Education
A March 7 post in Patheos Nonreligious hub’s Progressive Secular Humanist blog says it all about how Christian dogma embedded in American society insidiously perpetuates the faith.
Titled “Trump Administration Goes All In For Abstinence-Only Sex Education,” the post by Michael Stone focuses on White House policy changes that have empowered Valerie Huber, an abstinence-only sex-education restrictionist, to control the $286 billion federal family-planning budget.
Before being tapped by the administration as a senior U.S. Health & Human Services official, Huber was president and CEO of Ascend, which nationally promoted what they euphemistically and disingenuously termed “sexual risk avoidance” (aka “abstinence) among young Americans. She refers to sexual abstinence as an “anti-poverty” program, as if such self-denial will solve chronic economic struggles of the nation’s poor.
Clearly, if having unwanted babies were the issue and we assumed, rationally, that people (especially young people) have a long history of energetically resisting sexual denial (as multiple studies confirm), birth control would be a no-brainer.
But, no. Although pushing abstinence is not a practical solution to anything, it is being pushed by our government. Why? Because it is policy derived from Republican-promoted Christianity, which has long demonized sexual activity in all its rich permutations outside marriage (except, of course, for our dear leader). So, we are making current policy based on very opaque writings in a millennia-old book, not because such phantasmic doctrines make sense in the real world today.
Kashif Syed, a senior analyst at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is deeply concerned about the potential harm that empowering sex-paranoid Huber may cause to reasonable dispersal of federal family-planning funds. As acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at HHS, Huber is now the final decider and controller on where these funds go. Commenting in a Politico op-ed, Syed wrote:
“This is unprecedented, and has disastrous implications. We’re talking about a program that 4 million people rely on for basic reproductive health care—or in many cases, their only form of health care.”
Under guideline issued March 1 by the Trump administration, HHS is directed to fund programs that emphasize abstinence and “natural family planning” (aka the notoriously dicey “rhythm method,” which has generously propagated unplanned pregnancies for millennia).
The new guidelines blend nicely with Huber’s sensibilities. In a 2016 statement by Huber published in PBS.org, she said:
“As public health experts and policy makers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception.”
In that same PBS.org article, Laura Lindberg, the lead author and researcher for a joint multi-year Columbia University and Guttmacher Institute study on teen sexual behavior, pointed out that “improvement in contraceptive use” among teens from 2007-2013 accounted for the “entire” reduction in pregnancy. In other words, abstinence had zero effect.
Even as far back as 2008, the organization Advocates for Youth wrote that:
“Abstinence-only education programs are not effective at delaying the initiation of sexual activity or in reducing teen pregnancy.”
Huber’s vision to “normalize sexual delay,” in this context, is little more than wishful thinking with a religious undercurrent. The idea conflates with the notion that premarital sexual activity, especially regarding teens, is somehow immoral except within very narrowly prescribed norms. This is a religious, not evidence-based, conceit.
In his post, Stone reasonably contends that abstinence-only sex-ed programs do not provide practical, useful information to youths:
“Instead, abstinence-only sex education programs are most often covert vehicles to promote faith-based superstition and shame.”
And this is yet another reason Christianity perpetuates in America, despite many rational reasons that many of its doctrines shouldn’t.
