Idaho legislators and some parents are like mushrooms, they love the dark, but children need light to grow up healthy.
Nowhere is this more important than in sex education.
The status of HB 272 in the Idaho legislature is unknown as I write, but pass or fail the issue of sex education will be controversial long after I’m moldering in my grave.
Idaho law, and that of many other states, appropriately places the responsibility for moral training about sex with parents and churches; but neither is competent to teach biology or sociology.
There are many problems with HB 272, not the least of which is that most parents, even liberal ones, don’t have a clue about how to educate their children about sex.
Most parents could benefit from some sex education themselves, and that would include the fact that children — yes, even young children — are sexual.
We all — male, female. and intersex alike — experience both estrogen and testosterone during fetal development, and continue to do so as children and adults.
Try as they might, parents cannot keep children in sexual darkness and their efforts to do so can lead to problematic marriages and even to paraphilic disorders.
Sex isn’t just about hormones. Sociology has great influence on how we think and experience sex. So does religion.
Social attitudes about sex are based on culture. Society’s role is to set boundaries and that’s what Idaho legislators are trying to do, from an abundance of ignorance and fear of voter displeasure.
Unfortunately, America’s traditional sexual values evolved from Great Britain’s very unhealthy Victorian attitudes.
Even though the Western world’s sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s (sometimes called the second sexual revolution), our social expression of sexuality leaves much to be desired. Many sociologists consider that our first sexual revolution occurred between 1870 and 1910.
I earnestly recommend reading “The Sociology of Sex” for information on this subject. You can find it by searching on the web for “Juliet Richters+sex.”
I don’t recall any public sex education while growing up in the 1940s and 1950s and knowing myself as I do, I surely would have remembered it. The only biology I remember from my school days had to do with stamens and pistils.
Frankly, I don’t remember overt instructions from my parents either, except for an unforgettable trip to the drive-in theater to watch a movie of a woman giving birth to a baby.
With my parents! And good on them.
Almost as vividly, I experienced a lot of sexual disinformation during my childhood, as do children today. It is conveyed by other youth and, no, it isn’t healthy, and that’s the important point.
If parents and educators don’t provide enlightened, healthy information about sex, their children are likely to grow up with unhealthy sexual attitudes.
And, no, abstinence only until- marriage doesn’t work as well as its proponents believe, although it can and does work for millions of men and women only when appropriately taught and modeled.
Sexual expression before marriage is both theologically and socially problematic. Ideally, both husband and wife would come to the marital bed as virgins and there liberally enjoy the very special bond of intimate and loving unity.
Reserving sexual congress for marriage correlates well with marital happiness and less risk of divorce, according to sociologists at the University of Utah and the University of Maryland.
The federal government has spent billions of dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1969, though studies show harm and little benefit.
PubMed Central reports that comprehensive sexual education programs help teens delay the initiation of first intercourse, and criticizes the inaccurate information and distortion of data in these programs.
Parents and the Idaho legislature should let the light of knowledge dissipate the darkness that envelops human sexuality.
Day has lived in Pullman since 1972. He served on the Washington State University faculty for 32 years as a science communicator. He enjoys a life-long interest in agriculture, history, law, politics, and religion. He encourages email responses to his writing — pro and con — to terence@moscow.com.
