Time Immortal

I’ve read some of Baden Powell’s book Rovering to Success. In one chapter, he talks about women, and about dealing with sexual temptation. And basically, his lesson is one of restraint: when tempted, have a cold shower, or at least focus one’s efforts and energies onto another activity. His view, I think, was that the human person was able and morally required to rise above his or her baser instincts, and to use the body — in every capacity, in all its functions — responsibly.

Which is why it’s positively heartbreaking, the news that Peter Hitchens brings concerning sex and the Scouting movement:

…it is only natural that our new soft totalitarians should want to get their clammy hands on what is left of the Scouts and the Guides. These organisations, with their religious and monarchist origins, have been under a quiet, sustained assault for years, as they don’t conform to multiculturalism. Now they have caved in to the sex education fanatics, simpering ingratiatingly as they mouth the standard excuses. Here is the Chief Scout, Mr Peter Duncan, : “We must be realistic and accept that around a third of young people are sexually active before 16 and many more start relationships at 16 and 17.”

I can’t see that old Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, would have thought much of that. His cure for sexual urges was, famously, a cold shower. It is hard to imagine him handing out condoms to his young charges. I think he would have viewed this “realistic” stuff as defeatism. He would no more have agreed that it was necessary to accept this sad fact as inevitable than he would have surrendered Mafeking to the besieging Boers (look it up).

Just so. Scouting is supposed to be about standing for something, about standing up for principles, and about bettering oneself. Caving in to the whims and desires of the flesh, of the government, or of the sinful world, is not something any Scout is supposed to do; it betrays his (and now her) oath, which is first to God.

Sadly, Peter Duncan — though a likeable fellow in person — is no Baden Powell, and has not the stern quantity within him to stand up and say, to all who will listen, that Scouting opts to depart from the received wisdom of a self-dooming society, and to strike out along a more traditional path of teaching and practice where sex education and the teaching of sexual ethics and responsibility are concerned.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

In most of the United States, there about 24 abortions performed for every 100 live births that take place. In New York, the ratio rises to 72:100.

This suggests — strongly suggests — that New York women are making use of abortion as their main form of birth control (this comes as no real surprise).

The proposed solution: even more and better access to contraception.

The main concern of the pro-choice advocates? That by using abortion as a primary method of birth control, women may not be using other forms of contraception to full effect, especially condoms…thus leaving themselves potentially more vulnerable to contracting STDs. The over 250 infants butchered daily does not seem to register as a concern.

But strangely, the potentially harmful side effects of procuring an abortion — especially surgical complications — do cause concern. We don’t often see mention of those showing up in print, despite the fact that abortion does pose some very real risks to the health of women, some of which can be catastrophic and fatal in their aftermath.

What the contraception advocates seem to miss is that more and more people don’t seem to care about things like STDs and “protection”. In like manner to how something like obesity (an almost wholly preventable condition) is becoming more and more common (and more of a strain on health care resources), it would seem to be the case that fewer and fewer people are genuinely concerned about things which might pose real and tangible risks to their health. Indeed, the case of obesity is telling, as it is demonstrative of how people will prefer convenience over health — it’s not hard to shed pounds by doing as little as giving up fast food and soda pop.

So too where sex is concerned. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that women in New York, living a fast-paced urban lifestyle in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world, want convenience everywhere they can get it, including in their birth control. And while the contraception advocates rightly point out that birth control pills are much cheaper than abortion as a method of contraception, those same pills are also more convenient. Even the pill regimens that allow you to miss a day here and there are just not as convenient as an occasional, one-time appointment at a “day surgery” clinic. Ditto condoms…and I’d also be willing to bet that the partners these women take are just as glad that they don’t have to worry about using a condom.

Convenience trumps good sense almost every time, and that’s what we’re seeing in New York, methinks.

And really, as the Curt Jester points out, why are pro-choice advocates actually calling attention to this issue? Why, for them, is it an issue? If it is not considered immoral to obtain an abortion, then is a ratio of 72:100 really any worse than a ratio of 24:100? Is it any better than a ratio of 110:100? Who cares if people are using abortion in a contraceptive capacity, if we’re not supposed to care that people are able to obtain abortions at all?

What a wonderful world we have created with our post-Christian sexual morality:

People in their early 20s have grown up with heightened awareness of HIV/AIDS, and the dangers of having sex without a condom. So Youth Radio’s Pendarvis Harshaw argues that when a couple decides to forego condoms, it’s a serious commitment…that’s replaced the engagement ring…………………

Because clearly there is so much more meaning in something like that. Diamonds and gold? Who needs ‘em, baby…I love you so much I left the latex at home this time.

Cue the asteroid, please.

Update: Mark Shea’s take on this issue suggests that I was perhaps too quick to see the negative angle in this story.

Scripture describes Jesus as having pity on his flock because they were like sheep without a shepherd. I think the response of Jesus to a story like this is pity. In their own sad way, the youth in this story are facing reality far more clearly than their idiot parents who labored to reduce sex to a plumbing problem. marriage is indeed the sacrament of sex and the sexual act is indeed the body’s declaration of lifelong fidelity. contraception is the crossed fingers behind the back, the way of saying “Well, not really” while the lips say “I love you and give myself completely to you and our family.”

So the poor pitiable kids whose highest expression of love is to take off a condom is rather like the widow who offered two copper coins. It’s all he has and the Lord can work with that. Far more pitiable are the dolts who handed him that contraceptive culture in the first place and sold him the whole bill of good about the Imperial Autonomous Self. My generation has so much to answer for.

If there is one thing about becoming a parent that I fear, it is the part wherein I am responsible for educating my son(s?) or daughter(s?) about the need to approach sexuality with an attitude of sacramental reverence. It is my great fear that my child will turn out to be just another casual, callous youth who moves from bed to bed, and partner to partner, with the same carefree abandon one normally reserves for changing one’s socks.

Update II - The Road Warrior: Welcome, WebElf readers!

File this under “you can lead a horse to water…”

I think the good Reader can agree that Europe has evolved, in recent decades, very liberal sexual morés, and that European governments spend a lot of time and money promoting safe sex, birth control, and all the rest. I’m sure that sex-ed in European schools is probably quite comprehensive, much more so than in North America.

And what has been the result? Are European teens and young-ish adults more sexually responsible than their North American counterparts?

Apparently not: “[a] third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex.”

Almost half of participants in Vienna, Austria had drunk alcoholand had sex by the time they were 16 compared with 36% in Venice, Italy, 37% in Palma, Spain and 30% in Liverpool.

…

Those who had been drunk in the past four weeks were more likely to have had five or more partners, sex without a condom and to have regretted sex after drink or drugs in the past 12 months.

Cannabis, Cocaine or ecstasy use was linked to similar consequences.

Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.

“Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Chickens do indeed come home to roost; it was predicted, many years ago and many times since then, that comprehensive, birth control-focused sex education would increase the promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility of society.. Of course, only easily ignored conservative commentators were doing the predicting. Now that the evidence is showing that those predictions are being borne out, perhaps we can begin to re-think the damage we are doing to our children, and to ourselves?

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn’t looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don’t accept this, sooner or later, ’security’ is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn’t. I can remember when it wasn’t. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they’re here.

Canada is not all that far behind Britain in becoming a police state in all ways except for the actual establishment of a secret police. Our human rights commissions already censor opinions held to be “disagreeable” while at the same time serving as a vehicle of agenda and propaganda for subversive interests. Bureaucratic record-keeping is certainly monolithic enough in this country as to make the issue of a person’s ethnic origin a suitable topic for a medical form (when in reality, all that should matter is a) whether one is injured or ill and b) if so, in what way). And the dichotomy that has emerged between parental rights on one hand, and the whims of educators and health facilitators on the other, is well known here. But then, we opened that Pandora’s Box when we started giving fourteen-year old girls the option of getting an abortion, or a supply of condoms, without having to first seek parental consent, didn’t we?

Chesterton observed that if anarchists sought to throw down the small laws, they would be left with big laws instead, a none-too-subtle reminder that when one dismantles the pillars of a functional and free Western government, the result is not a governance-free anarchist paradise, but a dictatorship.

Analogous to Chesterton’s observation is the fact that if human rights commissions would seek to protect, at any cost, the human rights of every petty interest group that dares speak out, they will not be left with a paradise in which every person walks about in an optimal, self-actualized and enlightened appreciation of his or her own rights; they will be left with a place in which no person enjoys any basic rights at all. The police state loometh, in Canada as surely as in Britain.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

And if you believe that title, O Reader, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

A recent survey — the first of its kind? — in the U.S. has revealed that one in four women is infected with at least one of four common STDs — human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes or trichomoniasis. Fifteen percent of the infected women apparently have more than one of these four diseases. And — perhaps most shockingly — almost half of all African-American teens surveyed had at least one of the above STDs.

I know that Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist eugenecist who spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies, but I didn’t think that their programs would be so effective at crippling the black population in America!

All facetiousness aside, these results are nothing more than shocking, and should be taken as a scathing condemnation of the ever-more comprehensive sex education programmes that have been fed to schoolchildren since about the 1960s. Unfortunately, the president of Planned Parenthood, one Cecile Richards, has taken the opportunity to say that this study “emphasize[s] the need for real comprehensive sex education.”

It’s not a surprise that Ms. Richards would come out and say as much — Planned Parenthood is a moneymaking operation first and foremost, and both womens’ rights and womens’ health take a back seat to its drive to accumulate profit. But that doesn’t stop Planned Parenthood’s top person from trying to shift the blame away from her own group, its beliefs, and the changes they and others like them have effected in the U.S.

“The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure,” Ms. Richards said, “and teenage girls are paying the real price.”

I highly doubt that there is any teenage girl (or boy) in the United States that has not heard of a condom, and precious few teens of either gender who are unfamiliar with the use thereof. Condom availability is likewise not a problem; you can find them at almost any grocery store or corner drug store these days, in a wide range of sizes, textures, and flavours.

The problem, then, is not that teens haven’t learned enough about condoms and other “protective” measures — it’s that they are choosing, nevertheless, to avoid the use thereof, much as they are choosing to ignore whatever they might be learning about abstinence (since it’s damn hard to get an STD when one is abstaining from sexual activity). Because in spite of all the teaching, in spite of all the warnings, and in spite of the availability and ease of procurement of “protection,” kids still do whatever they damn well please. And no amount of additional education is going to change that.

Back in the barbaric 1950s (and before), STD rates weren’t anywhere near as high as they are now among the teenage population. There weren’t comprehensive sex education programs back then, nor were there condom machines in the bathrooms and racks full of condoms in every food or drug store in town. There was less “openness” about sex, and many people — especially Planned Parenthood employees — would characterize societal attitudes toward sexuality (especially premarital and/or teenage sexuality) as “repressive” (read: dependent on a measure of individual self-control and self-respect).

And yet it is only in our “open”, “enlightened” age that STDs are raging almost out of control in the population, in spite of the availability of condoms and the frankness with which children are taught about sex.

Clearly — obviously — the problem is that our comprehensive, explicit sex education programmes are not nearly comprehensive enough!