Sex Education: demoralising sexual conduct

 A talk to the Summer School of Theology at Metropolitan Tabernacle 2004, Dr ES Williams

A shameful record

It is now widely accepted that there is a crisis in the sexual health of teenagers in the UK.  It is often quoted that we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe.  According to Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, we cannot afford to continue to ignore this shameful record.  Every year some 90 thousand teenagers in England become pregnant, the vast majority of whom are unmarried.  Around 8,000 are girls aged 15 or younger.

There are almost weekly headlines illustrating the shocking nature of the crisis. The recent furore over a 14-year-old schoolgirl who was given an abortion, behind her mother’s back, on the advice of a sexual health advisor from the local NHS trust, has astounded, even shocked the nation.  A parliamentary select committee investigating the issue has identified what it called an unprecedented crisis in sexual health.  The latest statistics show that all the common STDs have more than doubled in the last decade.  And the greatest rises have occurred among young people.  

My aim is to show you why I believe that the current crisis is, in large part, due to the ill conceived national policy on sex education. Two essential documents outline government policy. 

The first is the Teenage Pregnancy report (1999), prepared by the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit.  It argues that the high teenage pregnancy rate is due to ignorance.  We are told that ‘young people lack accurate knowledge about contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, what to expect in relationships…’ The report concludes that there has been a drift into the serious error of moralising._[i] ‘Whether the Government likes it or not, young people decide what they’re going to do about sex and contraception.  Keeping them in the dark or preaching at them makes it less likely they’ll make the right decision.’_[ii]  In the Government view’s any attempt to introduce a moral dimension into the discussion on sexual behaviour and contraception is not only unhelpful, but also potentially harmful.  

The second document is Sex and Relationship Guidance (2000), issued to all schools and health authorities.  It asserts that teaching schoolchildren about contraception is at the heart of the Government’s strategy to reduce teenage pregnancy.  It follows that ‘staff in secondary schools should be able to give young people full information about different types of contraception, including emergency contraception…’ 

 According to the guidance, ‘young people need to know not just what safer sex is, and why it is important, but also how to negotiate it with a partner’.  The guidance insists that it is essential for schools to ‘help children and young people develop confidence in talking, listening and thinking about sex and relationships’.

 The Government’s target is to reduce teenage pregnancies by 50 per cent by the year 2010.  The main weapons in are sex education, with its ‘safer sex’ message, emergency contraception and early abortion. 

Contraceptives for children

The Labour Government’s policy to increase the use of contraception among children must be seen in the context of current patterns of use.  In the mid-1970s, as sex education was taking off, around 8 thousand under-16s were recruited into using contraception per year; by 2003 the figure had risen to 85 thousand—a tenfold increase in 25 years.  The shocking truth is that over the last three decades successive British Governments have succeeded in developing a contraceptive culture among children.  

Emergency contraception became available in the 1980s.  By the mid-1990s almost 800 thousand prescriptions per year were being issued.  In 2002 family planning clinics issued nearly 27 thousand prescriptions to girls under 16, and 77 thousand to young women aged 16 to 19._[iii] The number obtaining prescriptions from GPs is not known.  Yet the Government now has a major campaign to increase its use among teenagers—a scheme has recently piloted the provision of emergency contraception in supermarkets.  A DOH spokeswoman said: ‘We strongly support the involvement of Sainsbury’s, working with the local NHS, to improve young women’s access to free emergency contraception.’    

The background to sex education

So how have we arrived at the present situation where tens of thousands of under age children are using contraception?  For the past thousand years biblical morality has been the foundation for sexual conduct in this country.  Biblical virtues were widely accepted as the only sure guide to sexual behaviour.  How is it possible that Great Britain, once a great Christian nation, has fallen so low that the state is now issuing contraception to children in supermarkets?    

In the early 1970s, after the introduction of the abortion act in 1968, there was wide spread concern about the high number of abortions among young people.  Although there were already over a thousand FPA contraceptive clinics around the country, a Government review of family planning concluded that a substantial expansion was needed to reduce the number of unwanted teenage pregnancies.  The British Medical Journal argued that a policy of free contraception would help cut the number of unintended pregnancies.    

In 1973 it was argued in Parliament that an efficient and comprehensive family planning service, which included providing contraception to girls under 16, would reduce abortion figures._[iv]  And so in 1974, by an Act of Parliament, the British Government became responsible for supplying contraceptives to children.  It was now Government policy for the state to provide contraceptives to children under the age of sexual consent.  This Act of Parliament represented a massive change in social policy and was a landmark decision in favour of the sexual revolution.  

And the most disturbing aspect of the Act was that it allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives to children without the knowledge or consent of their parents—and hardly anybody outside the family planning lobby was aware of this fact.  Few people realised that doctors now had the right to prescribe contraceptives for children and keep the fact secret from their parents.   

So contraceptives have been freely available to under age children on the National Health Service (NHS) since 1974, and a number of ideologically motivated organisations, such as the Family Planning Association (FPA), the Health Education Authority (HEA) and the Brook Advisory Centres (Brook), have spent millions of pounds of public money on promoting contraception among young people.  How ironic that after three decades of free contraception for children, provided free by the state, the UK has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe!  How ironic that after three decades of free contraception for children, there is now an epidemic of STDs among young people.  Any reasonable person would conclude that the policy has failed—that the promotion of contraceptives is not the answer to teenage pregnancies.  Why then does our Government persist with the policy of promoting contraceptives among children, a policy that is clearly not meeting its stated objectives? 

The sexual revolution

To answer this question we need to explore the link between sex education and the sexual revolution.  In my book, Lesson in Depravity, I conclude ‘we can only understand the motivation behind sex education if we grasp the essential point that sex education has evolved out of the ideas of the sexual revolution’.  Many of the revolutionaries realised that sex education could be a powerful vehicle for promoting their ideas among children.  

Frederick Nietzsche was one of the early sexual revolutionaries.  He boasted that he was the original immoralist.  He totally rejected biblical morality.  His proclamation that God was dead led to the notion that there is no objective truth, and, therefore, no absolute moral standards.  His thinking introduced the ideas that would develop into the ideology of postmodernism, in which each person is free to decide his own truth and his own morality.  What I want, if it feels good, is right for me at that moment.  This philosophy opened the gateway for the sexual revolution.  Having removed the absolute moral laws of the Bible, people were free to decide their own values, to set their own standards.  The sexual revolutionaries, following Nietzsche’s atheistic philosophy, encouraged the idea that people, and even children, are free to develop their own set of sexual values, without regard to an absolute moral standard.     

Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic movement, constructed a view of human sexual behaviour that was devoid of a moral dimension.  In all his vast writings there is not the slightest suggestion that any sexual act is wrong or immoral.  He explained life in terms of a sexual impulse that is bisexual in direction.  In his mind, children, from the earliest age, have hidden sexual desires, which manifest themselves in the Oedipus complex. After Freud had pronounced his theories, people were encouraged to think about sex as an innate instinctive force, and to do so without any moral constraints. It is now orthodoxy to think of children as sexual beings. 

According to Roger Scruton, Freud’s ‘assumptions underlie the repulsive lessons in sex education that the national curriculum is now forcing on children—lessons designed to facilitate sexual activity long before personal love is possible…’_[v]  Freud opened the gateway to the sexual revolution even wider.  

Marie Stopes’s contribution to the sexual revolution was to cultivate the myth of sexual ignorance and to legitimise the use of sexually explicit language. Her Married Love was the first publication in England to use explicit sexual language.  The effect of her writing was to undermine modesty in the minds of those who read her books.  Her other contribution to the sexual revolution was to found the Family Planning Association, the organisation that is in the forefront of the sex education movement in the UK.

 The author of The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud, was a dedicated opponent of Christian standards of sexual conduct.  He outlined the objectives of the revolution in stark terms.  He asserted that at the heart of a sexually repressed society is the institution of marriage and what he referred to as the authoritarian family.  He realised that it was the institution of marriage that acted as the brake on sexual liberation, for it helped to maintain chastity and marital fidelity.  The family, which is the main vehicle for giving children a traditional moral foundation, perpetuates sexual repression.  So for the revolution to succeed marriage and the traditional family must be destroyed—only then can there be true sexual liberation. 

Reich saw that education was important for inculcating into children the ideals of sexual freedom. He propagated the notion that sexual explicitness is a key weapon for undermining conventional morality.  Children who have received explicit sex education would no longer accept traditional morality. 

Alfred Kinsey’s research into human sexual behaviour was an attempt to established a new morality._[vi]  To him sex is no more than a biological instinct.  His approach is strictly amoral—nothing is right or wrong, no form of sexual behaviour is abnormal or harmful and there is no such thing as sexual perversion, for every type of sexual activity, even bestiality, is natural.

 On the basis of his research findings, Kinsey presented a heterosexual-homosexual rating scale, which showed human sexuality as a continuum, with bisexuality as the norm.  Kinsey’s writings are important because they have had a significant influence on sex education policy, both in the USA and the UK, and also in other English speaking countries.  Kinsey’s theory of human sexuality as a continuum, with bisexuality as the norm, has had a large impact on sex education ideology in the UK.

 The ideology of sex education

In the last few decades the UK has been flooded with sex education resource materials, which include leaflets, pamphlets, booklets, videos, teachers manuals etc.  Over 100 million items of literature promoting the messages of sex education have been distributed in the last 20 years.  It is important to understand that the main organisation involved in sex education is the NHS.  Health authorities, with the assistance of the FPA, and Brook and other organisations involved in the sex education industry, have been actively engaged in distributing this literature, some of which is used in sex education lessons in school.

 Some of these materials are deeply offensive.  In 1994 there was a furore when the Health Education Authority, a Government quango, published its sex education booklet, Your Pocket Guide to Sex, which showed an angel astride a condom on the cover.  The booklet, written by the agony aunt for Just 17, contained information on the use of vibrators, oral sex and masturbation.  In parliament Lord Stallard said he believed that the booklet promoted promiscuity and was insulting to women. The Earl of Lauderdale called it ‘a glossy but degrading incitement to anti-family behaviour’._[vii]    

The morality of desire – only have sex because you want to

Let me explain the message of sex education.  I’ve selected a few of the pamphlets and leaflets produced by the Health Education Authority, Brook and the FPA, all of which receive substantial funds from the Government.   

The pamphlet Sexual health matters for young women (HEA) explains to a young woman that ‘whether or not you have sex can be a difficult decision to make.  But in the end it’s what’s right for you, and only you can answer that.  If you’ve decided you’re not ready for sex, then fine.  Remember, it’s your body, your choice and your right to say no.  Only have sex because you want to’._[viii]  The young woman is offered a choice of whether or not to have sex, and her decision depends on what she wants, on her sexual desires, on how she feels at that moment in time, and not on any objective standard of right and wrong.  Notice that if she does not want to have sex, then fine, it is her right to say no.  The corollary is that if she does want to have sex then fine, it is her right to say yes.  The inference is that whatever she chooses is right for her.  So the message is that, when it comes to sexual behaviour, young people should do what they want.  It is not difficult to see that this teaching leads to sexual anarchy, as each young person is encouraged to believe that they are free to do whatever they want to, whatever they feel to be right in their own eyes.

The booklet Private & Confidential (1994), published jointly by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of GPs, the FPA and Brook, has the aim of advising young girls under the age of 16 that they can get contraceptives from their GP without their parents knowing about it.  Young girls are advised that ‘it should be your choice to have sex.  Think hard about the decision, don’t jump into it before you’re ready and never feel you have to do it because someone is pressuring you.  It’s really important to get contraception sorted out before you start having sex – or as early as possible in your relationship.  Remember, you can get confidential help from a doctor even if you’re under 16 so there’s no need to take any risks’._[ix]  Notice the casual, amoral approach to promiscuous sex.  Girls of 13, 14 and 15 are advised that they can choose to have sex if they want it.  Notice the emphasis that teenagers should make up their own mind about their sexual conduct, free no doubt from the influence of their parents or the teaching of the Church.  One can only wonder how parents feel about this kind of advice being given to their daughters.  Note too the false reassurance that ‘there’s no need to take any risks’—as if contraceptives removed all the risks associated with promiscuous sex.    

The guidance provided to our children by sex education is based on the morality of desire.  The guiding principle is what a child wants.  As there is no clear distinction between right and wrong in matters of sexual conduct, each child is free to develop his or her own moral framework.  It is extraordinary that a country like England, which for centuries past has accepted the objective standard of biblical morality, should now teach children to develop their own set of values.

 The pamphlet Lovelife (HEA) records the thoughts of a teenage virgin: ‘Seventeen and the only virgin in my class – I thought I was the last person in the world who’d never had it.  Everybody’s doing it – maybe I should too.’ _[x]  Here sex education is using the classic propaganda technique of the bandwagon effect.  Everybody’s doing ‘it’, so you should be doing ‘it’ too.  Teenagers are actually being persuaded to follow the crowd and have sex.  The pamphlet advises the young virgin that ‘being prepared doesn’t mean taking the fun out of sex.  And it doesn’t mean you are planning to sleep around.  It just makes sense.’  And she can ‘be prepared’ by buying condoms ‘from a machine or in a supermarket where you can get them off the shelf with other goods.  Once you’ve bought them a few times you’ll find it much easier.’  Teenagers are advised that ‘if you’re likely to be in a situation where you may have sex make sure you’ve got condoms with you.’ This guidance gives a green light to promiscuous sex, for it suggests to impressionable teenagers that casual sex is acceptable provided they use a condom. 

Homosexuality

Sex education openly promotes the Kinsey’s view of sexuality.  The pamphlet Lovelife informs young people that ‘sexuality can be confusing at the best of times and if you’re not sure which sex you’re attracted to, you’re not alone.  Discovering your sexuality may take time, and you’re the only one who can decide where your true feelings lie.’ And if a teenager wants advice then they can phone the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard for a private chat._[xi]  Sex education ideology makes no moral distinction between heterosexual and homosexual sex—both are equally acceptable, it’s simply a matter of choice. 

 The FPA booklet 4 Boys gives young men the following advice.  ‘Getting an erection when you are around other boys doesn’t mean that you are gay.  But you may be sexually interested in other men – or even men AND women.  It’s not a problem; your body is yours to share with whomever you choose.’_[xii]  The booklet, Is everybody doing it? (FPA) gives this advice: ‘Sexuality is not the same for everyone.  Some people are attracted to people of the opposite sex, some to the same sex and some to both.  Most people will grow up to be heterosexual (fancy someone of the opposite sex) but this doesn’t mean that they are only attracted to the opposite sex all their lives.’_[xiii]

This advice is consistent with the ideology propagated by Alfred Kinsey, namely, that human sexuality is a continuum with bisexuality being the norm.

 Sex words and sexual images

Encouraging children to talk openly and freely about sex is an important aim of sex education.  The Department of Health has commissioned a national campaign to help parents talk to their sons and daughters about sex.  According to the sex educators, even young children need a sexual vocabulary; the larger the vocabulary the more they will feel able to talk about sex.

 An FPA training manual, The weird and wonderful world of Billy Ballgreedy, acknowledges that ‘talking about issues relating to sex is often unfamiliar and uncomfortable for young people, invariably causing much embarrassment and laughter.’  But the FPA has a technique for overcoming this embarrassment – the sex words brainstorm.  The sex educator allocates children into a number of small groups with a sheet of flip chart paper divided into four sections.  They are asked to write a ‘sex’ in each section, and then to think of as many alternative ‘sex’ words as possible.  Nothing is off limits, for sex education does not recognise the concept of foul language.  The groups are asked to call out all their words, and the group with the highest number is declared the winner._[xiv]  In another word game children are given a jumbled set of display cards with half a sex word on each.  They are set the task of matching the cards to complete the sex words.  The purpose of the sex word game is to empower both adults and children to be able to use sex language without any sense of embarrassment.  Nothing is taboo, and nothing is too embarrassing.  The purpose of these games is to desensitise children against sexual embarrassment; to overcome their sense of shame and extinguish their natural inhibitions. Eventually, when they are fully desensitised, they will be able to talk freely and openly about sex.

 Exposing the genitalia

Another dimension of sex education is to teach children about the genitalia in a way that is blatant and explicit. Many sex education films, books and pamphlets provide children with graphic visual images of sex organs, and it is now widely accepted that displaying the genitalia is simply a part of a child’s education.  The Brook booklet A look at safe sex, contained detailed, explicit, close-up, drawings of the sexual organs, including an explicit, realistic drawing of a condom being fitted to an erect penis.  The FPA booklets 4 Boys and 4 Girls provide graphic drawings of large groups of naked men and women.  The condom demonstrator is an essential tool of the sex educator.  Children are taught to unroll condoms on a realistic model of an erect penis. And all this must be done with no giggling, no sense of shame, for children are only truly liberated when all things sexual are in the open.  Sex must be uncovered and exposed; nothing is to be hidden, nothing is private, nothing is sacred – all is exposed in the name of sex education.  So the sex educators go about their work, leaving behind children who have images of the sex organs imprinted in their impressionable minds.

 In the last 40 years, since the advent of sex education, there has been a radical change in what society accepts as sexual decency.  We have moved from a society that believed in modesty to a society that glorifies sexual explicitness.

Embarrassment

The promotion of sexually explicit words and images among mixed groups of children undermines modesty in girls and chivalry in boys.  Teaching girls to use sexual words, to view sexual images, and to unroll condoms onto a dildo, is to demean their modesty and dishonours them in front of other children.  The assumption that girls need to know about contraception creates the impression in the fertile imagination of the young boys that they cannot wait to become sexually active.  The girls are placed in a situation where they appear to be interested in sex, and in the minds of the boys they become sex objects.  What excuse can any girl have for not agreeing to sex with her boyfriend when she is supposed to know all about ‘safe sex’?  And what girl who has practised unrolling condoms can pretend to be modest?  These girls are trapped—they are being prepared for a life of promiscuous sex. 

 Boys are being introduced to ideas and images that are way beyond their understanding.  The explicit images expose them to unnatural sexual thoughts that inflame sexual lust.  Any thought of chivalry and respect towards the girls has been blown away.  Suddenly the idea that they can have sex with a schoolgirl becomes a distinct possibility.  In the minds of the boys the girls have become potential sex objects, for they know about sex and how to prevent pregnancy.  The gateway to promiscuity is opened wide.  It is not difficult to see that sexual explicitness encourages sexual temptation.  When modesty is destroyed, women lose their sexual innocence and become sexually available, the objects of pleasure, to be used and discarded.  Casual sex becomes the norm and there are no restraints.  Sex is no longer an intensely private matter between husband and wife, but a trivialised game, a plaything, something to give pleasure to lustful males.  When young men lose their God-given chivalry they lose respect for women and become sexual predators who feel entitled to satisfy their lusts on the objects of their sexual desires.   

 Sex education and marriage

While sex education is profoundly anti-marriage in its underlying ideology, its usual technique is simply to ignore marriage.  In other words, children are taught about sex without any reference to marriage.  Children are led to believe that sex outside of marriage is the expected norm.  Children are taught that there is no distinction between marriage and other stable relationship.  This point is illustrated in an article written by a teacher, Susan Elkin, who is brave enough to report what is actually happening in some school classrooms.  She explains how the head of science asked her to teach a sex education module to a class of 14 and 15-year-olds.  She was provided with a pile of worksheets and a box of contraceptive samples, and given the task of teaching the children the mechanics of contraception, with the clear instruction, ‘We don’t, as a matter of policy, mention marriage or use the terms “husband” or “wife”.’_[xv]     

 Sex education and the family

The above analysis leaves no doubt that the message of sex education is profoundly hostile to marriage and the traditional family. Sex education has become a major weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority.  Sex education is slowly but surely replacing the moral authority of the family with that of the State, acting through the NHS and the state education system._[xvi]  What is deeply disturbing is that the UK Government is content to use the national curriculum as an ideological weapon to indoctrinate children against the biblical teaching of marriage and the traditional family, a teaching that has been accepted by the vast majority of the population for centuries. 

 A failed policy

Yet there is no doubt that sex education has failed dismally in its stated aim of reducing teenage pregnancies, STDs and abortions.  This is because contraception use among the young has an exceptionally high failure rate.  The more that young people are recruited into using contraception, the more sexually activity among young people, the higher the rate of pregnancy.  This is why there is such an emphasis on emergency contraception.  And the protection provided against most STDs is marginal.  For many of the STDs, such as genital herpes, gonorrhoea in women, chlamydia, HPV there is no evidence that the condom provides protection. 

The case against sex education

The story of sex education is a story that must strike fear into the hearts of most parents.  From the evidence that we have uncovered it is clear that sex education is being used as a medium for communicating the amoral ideology of the sexual revolution.  The sceptre of Frederick Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey lurks behind the sex education that is being foisted onto our children.  And behind the revolutionaries lurks the great deceiver, the father of lies, the prince of darkness, the one who hates children with a demonic diabolic malice that is beyond human comprehension.  We have uncovered one of the devil’s schemes.  Perverted, depraved ideas are now being taught by a massive, Government funded, indoctrination campaign.  Slowly but surely these revolutionary ideas are taking root among children.  Slowly but surely the revolution against biblical standards is producing its inevitable fruit.  As a consequence it is now commonplace for children to believe that they can do whatever appears to be right in their own eyes—that they can even set their own standards of sexual behaviour.  Many are being persuaded that they are entitled to make an informed decision to have sex when they want to, when they feel ready, provided they practice ‘safer sex’.  Many young lives are being shattered by the dreadful consequences associated with sexual immorality.

A better way

There is a better way; there is a message of hope in this dark world.  As the light of the world, it is the Church alone that can oppose the evil of sex education.  It is the Church alone that has the message that society so desperately needs.  We must take every opportunity to teach the biblical virtues of modesty, chivalry, chastity and fidelity.  These virtues must be preached from pulpits across the land and parents must teach them at home.  And this is the message: ‘It is God’s will that you should be holy; that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honourable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him.  The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you.  For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life.  Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit’ (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).    

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