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Suppose a politician proposed the following:
Provide economics education to children in the K-12 grades, using age-appropriate and fiscally accurate information, including information on how to stop the transmission of Ponzi schemes, prevent fraud and detect con artists.
Not very objectionable, right? Now replace the word “economics” with sex:
Provide sex education to children in the K-12 grades, using age-appropriate and fiscally accurate information, including information on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.
Has anything changed?
McCain’s stubborn insistence that his ad attacking Obama for wanting to teach kindergartners about sex is accurate betrays something more than the desperate need to utterly obliterate an opponent, and something more than a politician’s ability to stretch the truth for the purpose of hoodwinking voters. But before getting to that, let’s admit that there are sensible reasons to be careful in teaching young kids about sex. For one thing, at the kindergarten/early K level, they have more critical things to learn about – like reading, writing and counting. For another, they aren’t undergoing puberty — sex just isn’t in their life experience at that stage of their lives. When puberty is on the horizon, however, everything changes, and it becomes important for kids to understand sexuality so that they become responsible teenagers who grow into responsible adults.
Of course, the bill (http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus) that Obama voted for while in the Illinois state Senate – which stalled and died, incidentally – already takes age into account:
(2) All course material and instruction shall be age and developmentally appropriate.
And yet, could there be any reason at all to talk about sex to kindergartners/early K children? Sure: with children vulnerable to pedophiles and sexual predators, there is value in teaching kids about what is and is not appropriate physical contact:
(11) (8) Course material and instruction shall teach pupils to not make unwanted physical and verbal sexual advances and how to say no to unwanted sexual advances and shall include information about verbal, physical, and visual sexual harassment, including without limitation nonconsensual sexual advances, nonconsensual physical sexual contact, and rape by an acquaintance. The course material and instruction shall contain methods of preventing sexual assault by an acquaintance, including exercising good judgment and avoiding behavior that impairs one’s judgment. The course material and instruction shall emphasize personal accountability and respect for others…
Another “Anti” for the List
So if the bill isn’t doing anything unreasonable, if the bill isn’t attempting to teach kids beyond their maturity and grade level – and it allows parents to opt-out if they so choose – what’s the problem? Answer: sex itself. Oh, yes, that old canard. The puritanical fear and loathing of sex. McCain’s ad is saying, in effect: Obama wants to teach kids about SEX (before they learn to read)- OMG!! Subtext: Sex is dirty, sex is corrupting, sex for anything other than procreation is a sin – and Obama wants to teach kids about it.
And here we have yet another “anti” to add to the list of “anti’s” that characterize the GOP in particular and the Establishment Powers in general: anti-sex. We wouldn’t see this kind of hysteria if the bill were purported to teach kids about hedge funds before they learn to read. Nope. It’s sex. So it’s automatically bad. It’s no wonder the GOP base is so opposed to gay marriage (and sex): they’re hardly in favour of heterosexual sex.
I know, I know. This is all rather obvious. As my wife asked, “What took you so long?” But what strikes me most isn’t the fact that we’re still hopelessly moronic when it comes to sex, but how it subtly pervades our public conversations in a destructive manner. It’s not just moronic discourse, it’s weaponized discourse that joins anti-intellectualism (the kind that praises the vernacular over the eloquent, feeds the global warming deniers, keeps creationism on life-support, and still believes in the delusion of trickle-down economics) to keep people in a kind of philosophical slavery. That the Powers That Be get away with it is strictly due to voters letting them get away with it.
Immanuel Kant, answering (http://sap.ereau.de/kant/what_is_enlightenment/) the question of what enlightenment is:
“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians… guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult.”
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week's column and more at his blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com), and reminds you to Vote No on Prop vy Always Choosing Love (loveinitiative.blogspot.com).
