My spam filter is set to hold posts with multiple links. Be patient if you post multiple links. I’ll free it from limbo as soon as I see it.

Gotta fly. I’ll comment later.

God Bless

Everyone is talking about different angles on the Tebows, but Rod Dreher had an interesting take on Tebow being asked by reporters “are you saving yourself for marriage,” and replying “yes I am,” then laughing at the reporters for being embarrassed. A Washington Post sports writer even complimented his answer.

What grabbed me about this long column was way back at the beginning: sex education should be compulsory, and ten year olds should be seen as “sexual beings,” no matter what the family or their church might be teaching.

This is a lot like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, wanting everyone to be free to think just like they do — e.g., if you’re not an atheist, you’re not free. In this case, the authors of the report have a notion that “my personal attitudes toward sexuality, and the ones I share with the other people who prepared this report, are THE proper way for all human beings to think about sexuality.” Excuse me, but I might think differently about sexuality, and since its still a free country, sort of, I don’t have to think the way you do. I also don’t have to think the same way Gerard Nadal does, or the way Hugh Heffner does, or the way Barack Obama does, or the way Dr. James Dobson does.

Protecting children from obvious abuse has its place. But inevitably, since nobody has advocated that ten year olds are adults, eligible for adult prison sentences or execution, eligible to vote, etc., decisions about their upbringing are going to be made by their parents. There is a long line of Supreme Court precedent on this point, from

Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary

http://supreme.justia.com/us/268/510/case.html

to Troxel v. Granville

http://supreme.justia.com/us/530/57/index.html

Decisions about raising children are not helpful for the state to usurp, and as Justice Brennan wrote half a century ago, the framers of our constitution were no more willing to subordinate individual rights to the whim of electoral majorities than to monarchy. Planned Parenthood, or anyone of similar tastes, proclaiming that because Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other faiths don’t reach sex like WE teach sex, and therefore WE should get to teach ALL children OUR way, is totalitarian freethinking at its worst.

It reminds me of an obscure Ph.D thesis I read about while researching the biography of Howard University philosophy professor Eugene C. Holmes. His dissertation was a critique of John Dewey’s development of pragmatism. Dewey has come in for the same sort of flak Margaret Sanger has — he basically advocated public schools so the dirty ignorant unwashed children of immigrants would be socialized to be obedient factory workers. Holmes particularly critiqued the way that pragmatism had attached itself to populist and progressive currents in American politics, masquerading as democratic opposition to monopoly capitalism.

We have to get the nanny state social worker mentality unwound from both libertarian and communalist strands of our history and culture. Of course the way I frame this still means we will disagree about abortion, but, if we get the hands of this arrogant report off of children’s education, and if churches prepared to teach abstinence and fidelity can get a positive response from children they reach, then there will be a lot less abortion to debate about.

If I don’t do this later, please remind me. I plan a commentary on this, including the point you just made in conjunction with Abby Johnson’s reporting that PP makes its money on abortions. So think about it: The younger the children, the greater the contraceptive failure, the more abortions.

Malevolence.