Imagine that parents taught children to form healthy relationships with this line of reasoning: The best relationships call for honesty, generosity and mutual respect. Your chances of finding happiness, security and fulfillment in such relationships are very high; however, they require you to exercise self-restraint. Since you're probably not capable of self-restraint, here are numerous ways to form relationships in which you and another person consent to use one another for your own selfish benefit. These relationships require you to take careful precautions to ensure your well-being, but they are just as acceptable as the first kind and much more common. Choose whichever you feel is best. It may not make sense, but this is precisely how proponents of comprehensive sex education expect to teach young people to form healthy sexual relationships. The French House hosted the Spirituality and Choice Discussion Series on Tuesday sponsored by the LSU Women's Center, Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom and VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood. This session, "Sex Education: Too Much or Not Enough?" explored the compatibility of spirituality and support for comprehensive sex education. Each of the four speakers on the discussion panel claimed that ideally sex education should portray abstinence until marriage and the use of contraception as equally acceptable alternatives for young people. This approach is often called abstinence-plus or abstinence-based sex education. Each panelist emphasized the importance of ensuring that young people are free to choose what's best for them as individuals. I'm not sure a person can be expected to choose "what's best" when he or she is told that both alternatives are equally acceptable. Young people are always free to choose abstinence or contraception. Even programs that strongly encourage abstinence don't deny them that choice; however, they can only make an informed decision when they've got a clear picture of both alternatives, and they certainly won't get that from the sort of program Tuesday's panelists described. Acknowledging the validity of abstinence as a healthy choice while contending that it can be unhealthy to repress one's sexual urges is an apparent contradiction. How can self-restraint be healthy and unhealthy at the same time? Calling abstinence until marriage "ideal," as members of Tuesday's panel repeatedly did while admitting that you don't expect young people to choose it is pointless. Why mention abstinence if you're going to insinuate that it's practically impossible to practice? Someone who sings the praises of "choice" but implies that young people are incapable of choosing to master their sexual urge clearly has very little faith in their ability to choose. This relativistic approach is confusing and degrading, and its foundation of mixed messages, which attempt to give abstinence and contraception equal footing, is dangerously unstable. Now let's bring "spirituality" into the equation. Each of Tuesday's panelists spoke about the unity of the body and the soul or spirit. This unity necessitates a holistic approach to human relationships that explores questions about sexuality and sexual identity as well as sexual expression. The panelists were right on those two points, but a vague belief in the spiritual aspect of the human person and human relationships clearly doesn't lend any coherence or credibility to their allegedly "comprehensive" approach. At its most basic level, spirituality implies belief in something outside oneself or beyond the physical realm. For our present purposes, it implies that sex cannot be taken at face value as simply a physical or even a psycho-physical process, but the view of sex as primarily a source of pleasure does just that. An argument for contraception is essentially an argument against self-restraint and for consensual objectification. The contraceptive attitude says, "Let me use you, and I'll let you use me." This attitude cannot teach people to have healthy sexual relationships. If a healthy sexual relationship requires mutual respect, one must act unselfishly and practice self-restraint in order to have one. We recognize the need for self-restraint in areas of our lives such as eating, drinking and working, but we fail to see this need for moderation in our sexual lives. The sexual urge can surface without an act of the will - just like the impulse to eat, to feed an addiction or to vent our anger. We want to be in control of those urges, not be controlled by them. Abstinence is not an unreasonable idea because we are capable of controlling our sexual urge. If we fail to acknowledge our capacity to exercise that control, we consent to be slaves to our desire for sex. No freedom of choice there. When a person chooses to have a sexual relationship with another person, he or she "must be fully aware that what he or she is choosing is a person," Pope John Paul II wrote in "Love and Responsibility," his thorough response to the sexual revolution of the sixties. Sex is more than a source of pleasure, and we ought to view it accordingly. People are different from things, and we ought to treat them accordingly. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a comprehensive approach to sex and spirituality.
----- Contact Emily Byers at ebyers@lsureveille.com
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