Menace of safe sex

To encourage promiscuity among young people is one sure way of destroying a society, and anyone distributing condoms to students outside their school is deliberately engaging in that kind of misguided sabotage.

The frightening thing about the self-appointed mission of the young zealot who has founded the bizarre group named “Advocates for Youth Sexual Rights and Reproductive Health Rights” is that it is intended to protect young people! This 24-year-old joker started to give condoms to students of the co-educational Woodbrook Government Secondary School on Wednesday in the idiotic belief that he was rectifying a serious delinquency in the system and protecting students from the harmful results of this failure.

In explaining his action, he spoke with the apparent certainty of an expert: “Very few persons are informed about protecting themselves and are adopting risky sexual practices.” How did he come to this surprising conclusion? Well, maybe it was based on the intense research done over recent years by his Sexual Rights organisation. But he went on to say this: “How would you feel about me giving out cigarettes? I am not harming anybody's life by giving them a condom. The condom, if used properly, will protect them.”

Now readers will understand why we have referred to this man as a joker. Could he be anything else? But a dangerous one, nonetheless. It is his earnest belief that if the students properly use the condoms he has so conscientiously given them, then they would be protected! Oh yes, the students, in enjoying their copulatory rights, would have no fear of contracting HIV/Aids or any other sexually transmitted disease.

And that, he is positive, would solve the problem; teenage students would no longer have to build “their entire perspective about sex” by watching blue movies. Instead, they can themselves engage in the real McCoy, once they are properly using condoms. Their education on the subject would thus be enhanced by practical exercises and, of course, the more condoms they use the better.

Don’t laugh, dear reader, because this is a deadly serious matter which strikes at the moral fibre of our society. Anyone who actively promotes and encourages sexual promiscuity among our schoolchildren, no matter how “safe” it may be, is a menace endangering the future of our country.

In fact, what we seem to be dealing here with is a dangerous kind of eccentricity for the same joker admits that, unlike many of the young boys he now counsels, he waited until he was a young adult to engage in sex! But instead of advocating or campaigning for this kind of abstinence among our students, he is now busy handing out condoms among them with the obvious message that they should go ahead and have sex but only make sure it’s “safe”.

If he and his organisation would like to see the subject of sex more meaningfully dealt with in our schools, giving out condoms is hardly the way to go about it. TTUTA's president Trevor Oliver condemns their action as “a barbaric approach.”

But we have travelled over this ground several times before. The education of children about sexual matters has always been a contentious issue which the majority of parents feel should be left to them, as their nurturing responsibility.

In this context, the Ministry has a Family Life Education programme in schools which discusses issues such as health, values and sexuality which is as far as they would want to go, without interfering with parental rights. In our view, children's intimate questions about sex should be properly resolved by parents as an essential part of their nurturing duty and done within the context of a healthy family life. Anyone promoting “safe sex” among them, as we said, is a menace.