When we discover that such things are going on in our community, we need to have clear principles from which to oppose them. Inarticulate outrage is easily caricatured and dismissed by school authorities already inclined to disrespect parental opinions. We need to be prepared to show that we understand what is going on, oppose it unalterably, and understand why we must do so. The primary responsibility for the education our children receive lies with parents. This means parents have a crucial duty to be informed about and prepared to challenge the whole contemporary approach to sex education.
At root, the sex-education movement is a symptom of the hedonistic approach to human sexuality that has been promoted in our society in recent decades. The promotion of that hedonistic view of sexuality has itself been the cutting edge of the larger shift toward a selfish and pleasure-seeking philosophy in American life. Sometimes, it seems that the new idea of America is to pledge allegiance to whatever we feel like doing. Significant and influential segments of American society have accepted this philosophy so deeply that the very notion of moral responsibility is incomprehensible to them.
What group of people naturally lacks moral responsibility? Young children, of course. American society has been for some time exploring the possibility of becoming a nation of children in adult bodies. Obviously, the very distinction between adults and children will be the first casualty. The dangerous consequences in sexual matters should be particularly obvious.
Simply put, without the concept of moral responsibility we have no basis for determining when young people are “too young” for certain activities. In fact, maturity and judgment are required to make the decisions involved in human sexuality without disastrous results, but they are not required in order to have passions. Having decided that the passion is all that matters in legitimizing sexual activity, we have, in effect, decided that behavior destructive of self and others is a right.
Accordingly, we have systematically attempted to give children whatever encouragement and instruction is necessary to enable them to act like modern American adults — that is, as helpless in the face of their passions, unable to control their sexuality and concerned only with ad hoc techniques to minimize some of the damage of seeking whatever pleasure is at hand.
Ultimately we will find that a nation of such developmentally arrested adults is incapable of preserving its liberty. After all, physical self-mastery — the capacity to deny ourselves the immediate pleasures of the body unless our better judgment approves of them — is a necessary prerequisite to everything from peace on the playground to the subtler forms of self-mastery that make truly civilized life possible. War itself can appear to entire nations as an intoxicating attraction. Woe to a people not deeply accustomed to pausing and thinking before it acts on such attractions.
The habit of reflecting before acting, particularly when we are tempted by strong passions, is the foundation of the institutions of self-government. A nation of citizens incapable of such reflection will simply fail to judge well the seductive proposals of its would-be political masters. Having decided in principle that we are a people incapable of saying “no” to fornication, how will we say “no,” in a time of trouble, to political leaders who manipulate our desire for peace, or our desire for war, in ways that seem to offer immediate comfort or satisfaction?
As we increasingly educate our children, the citizens of tomorrow, to see only immediate pleasures and to act out of desire for them alone, we are systematically preparing our nation to be lead by the nose into whatever servile condition our cleverer corrupters can devise. As our Founders knew, and we have forgotten, the fundamental political choice is not whether or not we will have a master. Rather, individually and as a community, the fundamental choice is between mastering ourselves or being mastered by others who will enforce order on their own terms, and for their own interests.
The entire destructive sequence begins with the judgment that human beings are not capable of making reasoned moral judgments and of disciplining their passions in the service of higher goods that reason alone can discern — higher goods such as fidelity, friendship, love, and justice. The older view, the true view, that we are, in fact, moral beings with the capacity to discipline our passions, leads necessarily to a different prescription for the education of our young people. The answer to the sex-education agenda must be the reassertion of the view of the family as the school of the moral person, and thus of the happy person. For it is in the family that children must first and most formatively taste the truth that moral discipline is the key to real happiness.
To put the matter somewhat indelicately, the sexual passion of the young is one of the most powerful tools that older, wiser people have in the effort to form young people into moral beings. Once we accept that there can be no happiness without moral responsibility, we can see that there is no use for sexual passion outside the context of marriage and the responsibility that one takes for both relationship and children. We have a much larger challenge than teaching children how to be sexual beings — we have to teach them how to be moral beings.
It is in the family that children first experience and are formed by the relationships that make their lives human. Family, marriage, parenting — these are the context in which nature intends human beings to establish the habits and virtues that distinguish us from the beasts. Sexual passion is the physical invitation to join such a community. For it to play this role effectively, however, young people must have tasted the true, and higher pleasures of family in significant measure before they reach the age of physical maturity. And then they must be encouraged and directed to interpret their awakening physical passions in terms of the complete moral order of human life — they must be shown that the happiness their bodies seem to promise is only found, in its completeness, when it is sought within the family.
Recent statistics confirm the decline in two-parent families in America, which is now becoming a general phenomenon no longer confined, as it once was, to some poorer communities. This disintegration of the family-marriage culture follows directly from the divorce of sexuality from the responsibilities of marriage and family. The possibility that the sexual dimension of our young people's lives can be successfully incorporated into the higher, moral dimensions of human life that lead to happiness is diminishing as the family-marriage culture declines.
As our society's understanding that sex is a family issue declines, the last thing we need is institutionalized instruction for our young people that completes the abstraction of the physical aspects of sexual activity from every natural and moral connection to responsible family life. “Sex education” has precisely to do with being a mom and being a dad, being part of a family and assuming loving responsibility for children. And these are precisely the things that children learn from their parents. The notion that we can educate children on the meaning of their sexuality in a context systematically cut off from family life is folly on the face of it.
Sex education is family education, and family education is moral education. After we recover from our shock at the grotesque mechanical education in sex that the public schools are imposing, we need to look more deeply and see what has brought us to this point. We have permitted the adoption of an approach that divorces what ought to be the intimate connection between school, family and faith. We will defeat the corrupt and debased sex-education agenda only when we achieve victory for the vision of human life as moral life, and when we remember that moral life, more than physical life itself, must be conceived and brought to maturity within the family.
(Dr. Keyes is founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles. To visit their website click here.)
