Don't mess with people's religion

It's axiomatic that you can expect more heat than light when you start talking religion or politics.

Daily Reveille columnist Emily Byers, however, just can't help herself. This brazen hussy down at Louisiana State University insists upon trashing most college students' religion with incendiary rhetoric such as this:

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.

SHOCKING, ISN'T IT? This sort of disrespect of her contemporaries' -- indeed, our entire Western society's -- most sacred religious beliefs stung the student population at LSU, resulting in strong but surprisingly restrained and reasoned rebuttals in the Reveille's comboxes. To wit:

Ryan
posted 2/15/07 @ 11:13 AM EST

[QUOTE]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.[/QUOTE]

Wow, that's just a load of crap. How about "an argument for contraception is an argument against STDs and unwanted pregnancies and for two consenting adults to do something that is no business of yours or your church's".

How does this attitude not teach people to have healthy sexual relationships? It's much more healthy than failed abstinence-only plans. Why does mutual respect require abstinence? I guess it is easy to think this way if you discount all of the healthy relationships which have mutual respect without abstinence that people are in right now.

Maybe you need an article to justify your stance on an issue that is causing the death of millions of people, but publishing this load is not helping anyone.

Joe
posted 2/15/07 @ 5:39 PM EST

Travis, your comparison of sex to global warming is priceless. I love how you attempt to validate your biased point of view by trying to use irrelevant scientific facts. I suppose you feel that anyone who takes medicine for an illness is committing and unspeakable sin that goes against the natural process of life! Seriously, SRC and Ryan make excellent points in that it is scary that a person can become so brainwashed and lacking of any ability to think for themselves due to their religion or faith.

On a side note, just about every article written by this columnist makes me sick to my stomach at first, then I sit back and smile when I think how much more intelligent of a person I am for the simple reason that I am able to think for myself and how pitiful she is for being such a puppet.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I am a bit puzzled about the "freethinking" aspects of being a member of the largest and most doctrinaire religious organization in the United States, if not the entire Western world. Of course, I am not an adherent of the Church of the Holy Inconsequential Climax, so I admit to not being an expert on its internal discipine or on potential consequences facing dissenters.

I will admit, however, that some of the rituals of the Church of the Holy Inconsequential Climax are downright interesting.