by Jeremy Dys
For the last few weeks, there has been a raging debate in the thriving metropolis that is Charleston, West Virginia, surrounding a speech given by a women at a local public high school in which she was promoting abstinence. In her own colorful way, she urged freshman through senior high school student toward abstinence by explaining the wide array of potential risks associated with serial, premarital non-monogamy. All of the risks, warts and all.
It should be observed that wherever abstinence is taught to teens, there is going to be a lot of both controversy and snickering. This should be unsurprising and a reminder that sex is designed to be intimate, private, and ought to make us speak in demurred tones with rosy cheeks when we talk about it publicly and in mixed company.
We expect a certain level of immaturity from teens when adults talk to them about sex. What we don’t expect is for that immaturity to turn up among their parents.
In this case, it has been parents that have been quite worked up. On one side, it is parents who are bolstering the principal (who has received death threats for his invitation) for bucking the abortion industry-authored sex-ed curricula, generally, and focusing the attention of his students on abstinence, specifically. They’re not really the immature ones, though they’ve been bullied and vilified as prudes who want to deny their children both a good time and the reality of the way of the world.
On the other side are parents who are apoplectic that students were given a message about abstinence. They haven’t really addressed the validity of the speaker’s facts; they simply rant about the fact that there was no “other side” represented in the discussion and, though the speech was purely secular, they lambaste the woman for being a person of faith in public. They slander the speaker and drag the principal’s good name through the mud evidently because they believe that boys and girls from 15 years old upward ought to have no restriction on their sexual appetite, be taught – by the state – methods of sex that the state (and abortion industry) deem are “safe,” and then be given unfettered (read = free, at taxpayer’s expense) access to every conceivable form of birth control or contraceptive – including abortion (which is not a contraceptive, but an anticonceptive, but I digress).
This is what we get when girls don’t blush and boys aren’t gentlemen.
More bluntly, this is what we produce in a society that demands there is no distinction between the genders and certainly there can be no control over one’s base passions. Rather, humans are animals, incapable of restraint that must bend to the sexual impulse that drives them and those who restrain them are the so morally repressed and repugnant that they must be bullied into secular submission lest we perish as a species.
No. Sex and gender are lovely creations, given to God’s creation for our good and for His good glory. Sex does not control us; rather, we are given the gift of sex, certainly, for procreation, but also for an enjoyment that is unsurpassed. It’s an enjoyment that is less physical and more metaphysical, however. Long after the physical euphoria, sex sustains marital pleasure in emotion, spirit, and relationship. Sex reflects the complimentarity of our genders and reveals that each gender is distinct from the other and a contributor to the sex act in a way that compliments the other. It unites the actors to one another in a real and lasting way.
Yet, in the sex-at-any-time-and-without-consequences society in which we live today, sex and gender have been flattened into cave man like urges in which any warm body will do, rather than the ultimate unifying connection of complimentary genders, united for a purpose far greater than an emotional or physical moment of pleasure. It is promoted popularly as the one thing from which there are no constraints or consequences, save that both parties agree. No longer is sex meant to unite and connect; rather, it is used to “hook up” and then quickly unhook.
Sex in this culture has entirely divorced the meaningful unification of the genders from the concomitant physical pleasure. The former speaks of self-giving intimacy in fulfillment of what the other gender lacks. The latter speaks only in terms of individual, self-gratification in another person’s body. Such an individualized view of sex leads to disastrous consequences that reach beyond the dying idea of marital monogamy and into the brave new world of gender-bending pleasure.
Rather than become indignant to such a message of abstinence over appetite, parents ought to encourage their daughters to blush and their boys to be gentlemen.
In the case of the furor over this abstinence speaker, the girls opposed to this speaker have been using words that are shameful at worst and impolite at best. Why do we not value young ladies who treasure the uniqueness of their gender and protect the innocence of their sex? Where are the fathers shielding their daughters from exposing themselves by their rhetoric?
As to the boys, that this speaker had to talk about not having sex with a woman who is not your wife clearly teaches us that chivalry – while not necessarily dead – has been severely wounded in the sexual revolution. But, do we not want boys to be gentlemen? Is that not good for them as well as good for the flourishing of women and our society as a whole? Why have we abandoned teaching our young men that God gave them big muscles to protect women and children, not to take advantage of them?
Abstinence – refraining from having sex with a person not your spouse – ought to be a given expectation. Instead, a high school principal had to wear a bullet proof vest for a period of days because he encouraged kids to do what they are perfectly capable of doing: being a kid without fear of dying due to lack of sex.
That is what happens when girls don’t blush and boys aren’t gentlemen.
When sex is as common as the wind that blows, it is devalued. Along with it, the unique value of the genders are abandoned. Selflessness gives way to selfishness. Sex abandons its role in the permanent, metaphysical unification of the genders for a temporal bringing together of the genitals. And, so long as the practice is, “safe,” any genitals will do.
And, if you can read that last sentence without feeling a tad blushed yourself, consider how far our culture’s demystifying of sex and gender has actually reached.
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Jeremy Dys is President and General Counsel of The Family Policy Counsel of West Virginia. In addition to his duties of providing strategic vision and leadership to the FPCWV, Dys is the chief lobbyist and spokesman. Dys is regularly featured in local, state, and national print, radio, and television outlets. He lives close to Charleston with his wife and growing family. He is a lead blogger at EngageFamilyMinute.com and host of Engaging the Issues.
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