by Chris Alexion, Copyright March 19, 2006, all rights reserved. 285 views
Many of us have grown accustomed to a certain endearing inconsistency in modern statists. We shake our heads in wonder as they use both sides of their mouths faster than most of us can use one side. We speculate as to whether they're blind to their own internal tensions or revel in them. We ask how it can be that all the buzzwords they just heaped up against one position can be so readily knocked down to support another one, and then rebuilt to contradict the first again.
Stephanie Salter of the San Francisco Chronicle is one of these lovable statists. In a 2002 article entitled "Big Government preaches there's one kind of good sex" (March 24), she sets out to take those moralists down a notch or two, and in so doing exemplifies almost perfectly the method I described above.
Salter's article, in short, argues that it's wrong for the federal government to fund sex education that "teaches abstinence as the only positive choice." Salter rightfully remarks that this issue has turned some Republicans "into zealots for Big Government," a habit "that would be comically hypocritical if it weren't so dangerous."
In her holy zeal to make sure sex education remains unadulterated (no pun intended), Salter even goes further than a critique of President Bush's plan, taking a few shots at biblical morality itself. Her amusing litany of pejorative terms describes abstinence as involving, not merely "a lie," but "pointy, fundamentalist noses," "scientific ignorance," "medieval morality," and the "primitive weapons of fear and stigmatization." Apparently Salter enjoys this sort of argumentation.
Salter is right to criticize the Bush plan for federal sex education, of course. But she doesn't seem to realize that her argument works as much against her own view as against Bush's. Take, for instance, her denunciation of the new plan's "personal invasion and regulation":
Whatever your religious persuasion, are you not given at least a slight case of the creeps by knowing federal law mandates that abstinence-only programs include this stunning and unproven declaration: "Sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects"?
What could be more Big Government than a bunch of middle-aged Washington politicians sticking their pointy, fundamentalist noses into one of the most private areas of American family life? Bush and his like-minded social conservatives insist not only on defining good and bad sex for all citizens (God, what a thought!), they reduce the wondrous and monstrous complexities of human sexuality to a perversion of a sneaker slogan: Just don't do it.
Salter's complaints betray an ignorance of her own dogmatic view of sex education. She may not insist on "defining good and bad sex for all citizens," but she does insist on defining good and bad sex ed. for all citizens–and funding it with their money. She may not say, that premarital sex is wrong, but she does assert dogmatically that it's wrong (for all citizens) to set up premarital abstinence as a sexual norm. Even more embarrassingly, she rests this assertion on the stunning and unproved judgment that orthodox Christianity is false. On Salter's own terms, then, why shouldn't we reject her plan for federalized sex education? She's merely attempting to foist on us a federally-mandated course funded by taxpayers and declaring, implicitly, that Christianity is "a lie."
The same criticism, in fact, applies to the entire government school system. Whether we study biology, history, or sexuality, our underlying presuppositions are hard at work interpreting reality in the context of ultimate worldviews. Both the Christian and secularist worldviews lay claim to the academic disciplines, and both systems exclude the other. The broad and non-judgmental outlook Salter impossibly requires for sex education is impossible for all subjects. Neutrality is nonexistent. The whole of secular education can proceed only on the footing of a continual, though implicit, condemnation of Christianity.
Why should we have to pay for such a view? To borrow Salter's line, what could be more Big Government than a bunch of secularists sticking their pointy, fundamentalist noses into one of the most private areas of American family life? We skeptical types find it hard to understand why our money should go to support these secular fundamentalists' established religion.
But then again, secular fundamentalism was never particularly easy to understand.
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