Our righteousness is killing us | Sex in the Suburbs

I just returned from Washington, D.C., where I was privileged to be part of a Sexuality Education Advocacy Training developed by three faith groups.

We came together from all over the country to be a religious voice for comprehensive sexuality education.

Sexuality education is a moral issue, and religious communities and organizations come down with varying degrees of tolerance. A loud and heavily government-funded (more than $1.5 billion over the past two decades) religious voice has proclaimed that the only acceptable teachings are "abstinence-only" until marriage. This same voice makes wildly inaccurate claims about comprehensive sexuality education, scaring otherwise intelligent adults into withholding information from our youth — and that is killing people.

Aside from the fact that our government has funded groups to teach our children that HIV can be spread through tears, and that condoms have a 30 percent failure rate (www.tfn.org/site/PageServer?pagename=JustSayDontKnow), the most disturbing data is that this approach doesn’t work to reduce teen pregnancy or delay first intercourse.

Abstinence education, coupled with the knowledge of how to stay safe from pregnancy and disease, is what comprehensive sexuality education is all about. Scientific and unbiased research shows that comprehensive education around sexuality is more effective in delaying first intercourse and in protecting young people from both pregnancy and disease when they do become sexually active (Journal of Adolescent Health 42.4, March 2008).

Still, organizations like the Institute for Religion and Democracy criticize organizations like the United Church of Christ, which supports comprehensive sexuality education in its faith communities, as part of social justice ministries. And sexuality education is a social justice issue, when more than one million people in our country and more than 30 million people in our world are living with HIV/AIDS. Two million of them died of AIDS in 2007 alone. In addition, there are the one-in-four teen girls ages 14-19 who suffer from any number of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), with the statistic jumping to one-in-two for African American girls (www.cdc.gov).

By turning their backs on effective education, our churches are failing to care for the sick and love our neighbors as ourselves.

We also need to recognize that "abstinence-only until marriage" education excludes and condemns the 70 percent of our teens who are sexually active prior to age 19 (www.guttmacher.org/pubs) and the percentage of our population who identify as sexual minorities. These programs put up moral roadblocks to providing all people information they need to save their lives — to protect themselves and others from STIs that can cause permanent damage and death if not detected and treated early on.

Quite literally, we are killing people through a sin of omission of information.

I am fond of saying that I’d rather be effective than right. Being afraid of giving information and education in order for young people to make informed decisions discounts their intelligence and is akin to a governmental “need to know” mentality. Along with medically and scientifically accurate education, it is still possible to pass on your values as a parent to your children, as a youth director to young people, as a pastor to your congregation.

It’s time we stop arguing about who is right — and start standing together for the moral work of saving lives through education.

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