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Opponents in our last two threads say FIC is not truly pro-family unless we adopt the left-wing economic agenda. Now comes Courant columnist Susan Campbell with more free advice:

To people who worry that same-sex marriages threaten the institution, I have one powerful, life-changing word for you: adultery.

Pure and simple, what so often threatens traditional marriage – man-on-woman, woman-on-man – is not extending to same-sex couples the rights now enjoyed by opposite-sex ones. Instead, marriage is far more threatened by those of us on the inside, by adults who forget the seriousness of their vows and stray. If you really want to protect marriage, protect it from the heathens within.

Let’s ban adultery.

Leave aside Campbell’s assumption that redefining marriage into something it has never been and cannot be will not hurt the institution. And that those same 200-plus people we brought to the state capitol–who were ignored by Campbell because they opposed same-sex “marriage”–are now so interesting to her that she devoted a whole column to how she thinks they should spend their time. And her column’s curious omission of any reference to divorce.

Leave it all aside for a moment and my response would be this: Ban adultery? I’m all for it. But I tell you what, Susan. I’ll see your adultery challenge and raise you one demand for abstinence education. This article about a book critical of the “hook up” (casual sexual encounter) culture of teenagers appeared the same weekend as your column:

Now a new book on this not-so-new subject is drawing fire in some quarters for its conclusion: That hookups can be damaging to young women, denying their emotional needs, putting them at risk of depression and even sexually transmitted disease, and making them ill-equipped for real relationships later on.

For that, Laura Sessions Stepp, author of “Unhooked” and a writer for The Washington Post, has been criticized as a throwback to an earlier, restrictive moral climate, an anti-feminist and a tut-tutting mother telling girls not to give the milk away when nobody’s bought the cow.

Is Stepp “drawing fire” because she’s one of those dreaded religious conservatives who thinks sex should only occur within marriage? Hardly:

True, she regrets that “dating has gone completely by the boards,” replaced by group outings that lead to casual encounters…But she isn’t saying girls should not have sex; just that they should have it in the context of a meaningful connection: “I am saying that girls should have choices.”

And even that message is more than some of our opinion elites can bear.

Nevertheless, Stepp is right. The culture she describes does leave girls–and boys–“ill equipped for real relationships later on.” The epidemic of adultery that Campbell would like us to ban–accounting for possibly half of all married couples, according to her–does not come out of nowhere.

So, Susan, I ask you: Put aside your usual crusades. Forget your effort to redefine marriage. Stop attacking those conservative Christian roots that you are so proud to have escaped from.

Do you really want to lessen the instance of adultery in our society? Then give today’s young people a fighting chance for a healthy marriage by supporting abstinence-only education.

 

9 Responses to “Susan Campbell With More Free Advice for FIC”

  1. on 12 Mar 2007 at 12:12 pmSimon

    Not sure we should spend more than the $1Billion already spent on it.

    Abstinence-only sex ed finds few scientific fans
    Birth control taught in shrinking number of schools, study says

    There is no good scientific evidence that teaching abstinence to teenagers will by itself prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, say the authors of a recent study. Yet they found that comprehensive sex education is declining and that more youngsters are being taught nothing more than abstinence.

    As with similar debates over stem cell research and abortion, California and the Bush administration are at loggerheads over an ethical issue with far-reaching public consequences — in this case, the best approach to sex ed for middle and high school students.

    More than $1 billion in federal aid has been poured into state-run abstinence-only programs in the past decade after the Bush administration decided there was an imbalance that favored comprehensive sex education and slighted abstinence. State school systems accepting the federal money are required to teach that sexual activity outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects, and that a married, monogamous relationship is the expected standard.

    California is one of only three states — the others are Maine and Pennsylvania — to refuse the federal education funding tied to abstinence.

    The recent study, by a team of scholars at the Guttmacher Institute in New York headed by Laura Duberstein Lindberg, looked at instruction between 1995 and 2002 nationwide and found that “teenagers were significantly more likely to have received instruction about how to say no to sex than … birth control methods” and that abstinence was being pushed in sex ed classes “in the absence of any substantial scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of the approach.”

    Published in the December issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, a leading journal, the article attributed the trend to the federal funding, which since 1996 “has shifted toward programs that teach only abstinence and restrict other information.”

    Under an education code revision passed in 2003, teachers in California school districts are required to teach HIV/AIDS prevention and are also permitted to teach comprehensive sex education, as virtually all districts do. But exactly what districts teach is up to them, so long as they adhere to state guidelines requiring that their information be medically accurate and that they provide information about contraception while emphasizing that abstinence is the only sure method to avoid pregnancy.

    California “made it clear where we stand,” said Hilary McLean, press secretary for state schools chief Jack O’Connell. “And yet the Bush administration and the state are still debating this.”

    Douglas Kirby, a senior researcher at ETR Associates in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County) and the author of a far-reaching 2005 survey of the effectiveness of sex education programs worldwide, said that the Guttmacher Institute conclusion was “not surprising” but was “very disturbing. We’ve put more than $1 billion into abstinence-only (education) when we do not know whether these programs work,” he said.

    Among the 83 studies on the effectiveness of various sex education programs that Kirby reviewed, he found six studies of abstinence-only programs that met his research standards. “While that was too few to reach any conclusions,” he wrote, none of the six programs delayed the age at which the students first had sex.

    “The jury is still out,” Kirby said in an interview. “At the same time, abstinence-only programs are replacing programs where we have good evidence that they do work.”

    The debate — as much cultural and political as it is scientific — over the most effective way to help young people avoid early sexual activity, pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases, and their economic and societal consequences, is taking place amid trends that indicate the sexual practices of teens are changing.

    Since 1991, teen pregnancies in the United States have declined by one-third, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers at the CDC also have found that 46.8 percent of high school students say they have had intercourse, a 13 percent decline over that same period.

    Another recent survey by the Guttmacher Institute revealed that 95 percent of Americans say they had premarital sex.

    “If people were to remain abstinent until marriage,” Kirby said, “then we would in fact dramatically reduce unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease and poverty.

    “On the other hand, we know that people in this country greatly value sexual intimacy regardless if it’s in marriage. So it’s not accurate to say that abstinence is the value of the United States when it’s not held by 95 percent of the population.”

    Angela Griffiths, executive director of Await & Find, a Hayward-based abstinence-only program, said refusing federal aid is costing California more than $7 million a year. The loss of an opportunity to reach more youngsters “makes me want to puke,” she said.

    Community-based programs in California do receive abstinence-only funds from a separate federal funding stream established in 2000. Await & Find gets $800,000 a year in Community-Based Abstinence Education Program funding — the highest amount awarded to any California nonprofit.

    Griffiths also took issue with the Guttmacher Institute’s conclusion that there is no proof that abstinence-only programs are effective.

    “That’s incorrect,” she said. “Mind you, it depends on how you define abstinence. If you walk into a classroom and just say, ‘Don’t have sex,’ that is narrow, fear-based and inappropriate. We provide comprehensive primary health education that helps young people abstain from any behavior that is potentially harmful,” including eating disorders, drug use and violence, as well as sex.

    Kirby said that one tactic of the Bush administration was to eliminate a list of programs that were proven to work, compiled by the CDC. Those programs take a multitude of approaches, but have many characteristics in common. “It was eliminated because it had no abstinence-only curricula,” Kirby said. “It was very sad, a huge loss. The political pressure in this field has been astounding.”

    In November, the Bush administration appointed a new abstinence-friendly chief of family planning at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Eric Keroack had been medical director at a Massachusetts pregnancy counseling organization whose Web site states: “The crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness.”

    The administration also has budgeted another $241.5 million for abstinence-only programs in 2007. Kirby compared California and Texas, two states he said were similarly populous and were home to many Hispanics, a group whose teen pregnancy rates are high.

    “California took a very progressive approach,” he said. “Texas pushed abstinence and made it a little more difficult for teens to receive contraceptives. Pregnancy did go down between 1991 and 2004, but Texas had the second-lowest decline of all states, 19 percent. California had the second-greatest decrease, 46 percent.

    “What’s really sad is that Bush is trying to take some of the policies that didn’t work in Texas and implement them nationwide.”

    “Wonderful as California is,” said Claire Brindis, a professor of pediatrics and health policy at UCSF, “adults have jumped to the conclusion that we have enough solid family life education.”

    She believes comprehensive sex education should be required, rather than merely permitted, by the state. “Because there are so many myths out there,” Brindis said, and teens grow up in a culture dense with sexualized mass media.

    “One myth I’ve heard is that a person can’t get pregnant the first time, and by the way, 20 percent of teens do. I’ve heard that if your boyfriend drinks Mountain Dew you won’t get pregnant, or if you have sex standing up. Or if you sit on a cold sidewalk after you have sex — I heard that in Southern California.

    “I see in my work how early childbearing is both a result of poverty and how it contributes to an endless cycle of poverty. There’s a lot of people who believe knowledge is dangerous, that if you give kids more information about condoms they’ll go out and have sex.

    “But isn’t it better,” Brindis asked, “to give young people and our large immigrant population the tools to plan? I can’t think of anything more moral.”

    link to article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/11/MNG7VO2LUV1.DTL

  2. on 12 Mar 2007 at 2:44 pmDoug

    I vaguely recall reading in our state’s criminal statutes quite a few years back, that adultery and sodomy were both banned. Our great liberal bastion repealed, or should I say, “unbanned” them. Is Susan Campbell suggesting we now undo what her like-minded minions did back then?

    Those repeals were not the initial opening of Pandora’s Box, but they widened the flood gates further.

    The result has been the increased destruction of society from both straights and gays as former societal, legal and religious taboos have been abandoned regarding issues of sex, fidelity, marriage and life.

    Now we have more broken families, more abusive relationshsips, more dysfunction, more heartache, more chronic and even fatal STD’s, births out of wedlock, abandoned children, abused children, more violence, more crime, mofe misguided kids, more self-medicating substance abuse and more unhappy, unfulfilled, mixed up secular people, straight and gay, humping each other like dogs in heat for no other purpose than instant physical gratification like human sex toys, and then going into therapy and asking, “Why?”

    And yes, we also now have more open homosexuality and the attached problems to individual and society alike caused by that deviant practice as well.

    The less we think of others, and the more we think of ourselves, our wants, desires, wims and narciccistic sel-centeredness, the less signifcant human life becomes. Having surpassed that obstacle, hedonism and the using and manipulation of other people for our own wants becomes much easier.

    You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time, but after the first bite, the rest become easier.

    But there is no free lunch, as the sage adage reminds us. The price paid for evil is more evil. Evil doesn’t care who it hurts. It knows no loyalty or gratitude, and it does not recognize sexual preference.

    Had adultery and sodomy not been removed from the books, we wouldn’t be having this debate today. Once again, the more time passes, and as more memories fade, the more excuses (not reasons) people, be they straight or gay, see and use to zealously engage in negative and destructive behavior of any kind.

    Somehow, I think if we “re-banned” adultery and sodomy, Susan Campbell would just come up with another excuse to defend her ideology.

    But ideologies aside, one negative behavior is never justified by another negative behavior. They’re just two different negative behaviors.

    In either case, her point is moot.

  3. on 12 Mar 2007 at 3:28 pmmatt

    Doug, I’d love to hear how oral sex creates homosexuals and destroys marriage. I gather that there are a non-trivial number of men who would be permanent bachelors were it not for the prevalence of the practice.

    Simon, interesting article, but edit, man. It wasn’t *that* interesting.

    And Peter, perhaps Stepp is drawing fire because she thought using livestock metaphors to describe adult women and their relationship decisions was a good idea. Hint for the gentlemen: referring to women as “cows” will never, ever be in fashion, even if “traditional marriage” might have treated the two as roughly equivalent.

  4. on 12 Mar 2007 at 4:14 pmProgressive Catholic

    This is all so frightfully silly. Marriages are not broken up by other committed couples who seek to marry.

    But what is even more silly is this blogger using Laura Sessions Stepp’s book to justify a call for abstinence-only sex education. Obviously, this blogger didn’t read the book and doesn’t know anything about Laura Sessions Stepp. Read the book before you use her writing to promote your views.

    She’s a parent of a kid who went to public school during the political push for abstinence-only education rather than comprehensive sex education that fully addresses the emotional and physical complexities of human sexuality. Sessions Stepp has been writing about her son’s contemporaries since he was an early adolescent, and she clearly sees that the simplistic “just say no!!!!” message that students received in school, coupled with the hypersexuality in the media, was woefully inadequate in preparing this young generation to have emotionally and physically healthy sex lives.

    Numerous studies have shown that abstinence-only sex education (as well as wrongheaded ridiculous programs like Virginity Pledges and Virginity Balls) result in unhealthy behaviors. While a few studies have shown that students in those programs may delay the onset of vaginal intercourse by an average of six months to 18 months more than students enrolled in comprehensive sex education programs, students in abstinence-only programs were far more likely to engage in risky anal and oral sex as well as far more likely to have unprotected sex of all kinds. That hardly prepares students for healthy future marriages!

    An organization claiming to seek to “protect marriage” might actually consider finding out why marriages break up. You discount “a left wing economic agenda”…and yet every major study I have ever seen on dissolution of marriage cites economic pressures/money issues as the number one precipitating cause of marital problems, NOT adultery.

    And yet you simply brush off the two suggestions that actually seem to have a possibility of helping marriages — supporting economic policies that support working families, and looking within ourselves to find out why so many married STRAIGHT couples choose to commit adultery. Comprehensive sex education doesn’t encourage promiscuity or adultery; in the age of abstinence-only education, we see *increases* in sexually unhealthy behaviors among young people. Comprehensive sex education addresses the emotional and physical complexities of sex and better prepares adolescents for stable, mature, and healthy relationships.

    Rather than trying to blame the problems with traditional marriage on same-sex couples — which is an example of magical thinking akin to blaming divorce on the tooth fairy — you might look to what causes people to divorce in the first place.

  5. on 12 Mar 2007 at 8:06 pmModernFemme

    PC, I’ll take your silly and raise you one stupid. Like, it’s really stupid to criticize the “blogger” for not reading a book but then not read his blog. The “blogger” – his name is Peter – doesn’t suggest that Ms. Stepp or her book concludes that AOE is best. He draws this conclusion himself from the facts presented in the article. Noting, all along, the irony that neither Ms. Stepp nor other cultural “elites” would probably support AOE. Also, where does the “blogger” in this post, link SSM and divorce? You regressives claim that FIC is “obsessed” with SSM, yet, here is your big chance to discuss a different topic, and half of you can’t.

    More observations of “stupid”. . . reading manly posts defending “comprehensive” and thorough sexual education in our schools. Of course you are going to support it! Teaching teenage girls how to apply condoms has been a huge windfall – FOR MEN. 1 Billion is small potatoes compared to the expense incurred in the form of heartache, mental suffering and physical pain to America’s young women force-fed sex-ed in the 80s and 90s. I attended CT public schools my whole life (I know, it shows), and I never heard one peep about AO, except as something too “silly” to discuss. Of course, I got my “sex-ed” in large auditoriums with all genders, lectured to by hip, trendy twenty-something know-it-alls about the benefits of pre-marital intercourse – all good and pure so long as you use “protection”. I’m sorry, but where was my emotional protection? Maybe some of you think values are attained based on your economic status – but I can think of a lot of young women who would have benefited greatly, regardless of their pocketbook, from a lesson on abstinence. So take your condoms, your peep-shows, your frank-talks, put them in your “Guttmacher” and stuff it.

  6. on 12 Mar 2007 at 10:03 pmDoug

    Matt,

    You are putting your words in my mouth again.

    I never said oral sex creates homosexuals and destroys marriage. As a matter of fact, I never even mentioned oral sex at all.

    An sexual act is a gift of love and a means of procreation between a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage.

    As for a sexual act beyond those paramaters, and it’s negative residual effects, I already succinctly defined it.

  7. on 12 Mar 2007 at 10:49 pmTrueBlueCT

    Darn–

    I am laughing out loud, and blushing like a maniac at the same time! All this talk about sex, sex, … SEX! Wowsa, wowsa, wowsa!

    Luckily I have been re-born as a virgin, and have been abstinent for as long as I can remember….

  8. on 13 Mar 2007 at 8:56 amchele

    ModernFemme,

    You were looking for emotional protection? Where was your mother?

  9. on 13 Mar 2007 at 11:36 pmmatt

    Doug, oral sex is a form of sodomy.

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