Seems to me that there are two attitudes concerning sex education…

• Sex education is the teaching of promiscuity, rather than of abstinence.
• Sex education is the teaching of safety in face of promiscuity.

The Roman Catholic Church, in all of her wisdom, goes with the first one because of their ethical teaching on marriage and the family. But, as a product of the Catholic education system myself, I have to question this decision. In the past, I’ve lived a rather sheltered and naive life when it comes to sex, I’m a little embarrassed to say but up until a few years ago I thought it was possible to get an infection/disease from kissing! The very little knowledge of sex that I had came from older friends who, in retrospect, probably weren’t the most reliable sources.

At the time I was discovering new feelings, I had no idea of the dangers of exploring these. Do I not have the right to know what an sexually transmitted infection (STI) is, and how they’re transmitted? I believe you can catch some of them simply by using the same towels as other people so surely it’d make sense to give teenagers a basic overview. It’s not like teaching me that much at school would have meant I would have gone out and had sex with the nearest girl. I mean, I don’t smoke but I know all about lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases. And, you can develop lung cancer without smoking. In the same way, you can know about STIs without having sex, and you can catch some of them without it as well!

It gets a little tricky when moving into prevention of STIs. In secular schools, they’re taught how to put a condom on a banana but it’s not like that at Catholic schools since we consider condoms to be intrinsically evil. Whilst personally I would have liked to have been taught this, just out of curiosity more than anything (returning to the smoking analogy, I know how to smoke a cigarette but I choose not to), I do think it’s right that the church doesn’t teach this. Despite the fact that not doing so may encourage people to look on the Internet or ask for advice from an unreliable source, it’s asking too much – educating about STIs is one thing, but telling kids how to use condoms is another. Consider the USA, where you can shoot human-shaped targets at a firing range but are told not to shoot people – 65% of homicides in the US are committed using a firearm.

I’m not actually sure how to end this post, it doesn’t feel finished but I don’t have anything further to add. I guess I should affirm that I do agree with the church’s stance towards condoms (although I refuse to disclose my personal fidelity to this online for obvious reasons) and I’m not calling that into question, but I do think that basic education about STIs wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in a world as promiscuous as ours.

Labels: commentary, contraceptives, ethics