The idea that we should make it more and more unattractive for young people to have sex is an absurd argument against protecting people. Maybe we should inject everyone with a chemical that will kill them if they have sex, and only give them the antidote on their wedding night! Authoritarianism never kept people holy, it just kept ‘undesirable’ people excluded and hidden away.
I thoroughly agree that the goal shouldn’t be to scare kids out of having sex. We should present all the costs, including the emotional ones, but also the enormous benefits, physical, mental and emotional ones of treating your body like something sacred, and as a gift to be saved for one person.
I do have to say, as a one-time teenager, who still remembers to some extent how his mind worked, and didn’t work, in his teen years, and who is astounded at how easily others forget, I find it undeniable that teenagers are extraordinarily susceptible to the power of suggestion, and their ability to make rational decisions is minimal at best. Most teenagers just do not comprehend the long term effects of their actions - they hardly think months ahead of time, let alone years. Thus the potential physical ramifications of having sex are going to be more prominent in their minds. I’m not saying leave them out to dry to suffer the consequences. I’m saying we should be realistic about what that message sends. It signals an expectation, the expectation that she needs to be protected. Teens are at least rational enough to know that if there wasn’t a good chance that they’d need protection, they wouldn’t be getting that shot. And that isn’t just a minor point, one more small thing in their minds. That amounts to a paradigm shift in the way that teens will approach their relationships. In the teenage mind, there is an enormous difference, in situations of compromise and temptation, between “I know I shouldn’t have sex at all,” and “I know I shouldn’t have sex, but my parents have acknowledged that I might, and acted as though I might.” It doesn’t take a psych major to think of the impact that will make on a teenage, hormone enraged, mind.
I just think its a reality that this attitude of inevitability of teenagers’ having sex is a historically new and recent phenomenon. There were times in history when young people were expected to wait until marriage - and by and large, they did.
Of course there has already been sexual immorality; it would be intellectually dishonest, however, to deny that we are living today in a moral chaos like few eras since before the dawn of Christianity. And so much of it has to do with our expectations. Teaching kids to use birth control ‘just in case’ is comparable to giving up on them.
This turned into something too long. I just had the thought - I’m pretty sure that for every degree closer to believing that “protecting” kids and teaching them about “safe sex” an individual gets, the less of a tragedy he or she probably thinks it is when teens do fall to that pressure. I, for one, consider every premature loss of virignity a tragedy. We’re children of God, made to love and be loved, made for union. We’re not made to give ourselves away before we even know what we’ve got.
