All posts in category Teaching Sex and Sexuality

Would You Fire This Teacher?

HT: MM

Would you fire a teacher if he did any of the following?

  • Graphically described a sex act to his high-school class?
  • Graphically described a homosexual sex act to his high-school class?
  • Graphically described a submission/bondage sex act to his high-school class?
  • Read a poem in class by one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets?

The trick, of course, is that the teacher in question did all of those things, and all at the same time.  We read news from the wilds of South Windsor, Connecticut, where an experienced and award-winning teacher was pushed out of his classroom.  His crime?  Reading Allen Ginsberg’s 1968 poem “Please Master.”

The SAGLRROILYBYGTH will no doubt leap to the culture-war implications of this case.  To my mind, Olio’s ouster raises a couple of issues of perennial difficulty.  First, what are public schools supposed to be doing about sex?  And second, are hippies heroes or villains?

Your sub for today will be hairy...

Your sub for today will be hairy…

As David Freedlander reports in The Daily Beast, David Olio had taught in the district for nineteen years.  He had won awards for teaching excellence.  On the fateful day in question, a student brought in the Ginsberg poem and asked if they could read it in class.  Olio agreed.

The poem does contain some pretty explicit sexual language.  It makes me uncomfortable to think about reading it to any group of people.  More interesting, though, are the interpretations of Olio’s use of the poem.  Progressives see it as a proper and even heroic act.  Conservatives call it something else entirely.

As Freedlander argues from the progressive side, shouldn’t high-school students be reading such things?  Students at that age are keenly aware of explicit sexual activities, even if many students have only vague and false notions of what they are.  Is it not the point of a rigorous education to guide students through these difficult and controversial topics?

Or is this a question of sexual malfeasance?  At Breitbart.com, Susan Berry pleads the conservative case against Olio.  Using such “graphic gay sex” material in class, Berry believes, abrogates the “trust” parents place in public schools.

At the heart of such disagreement lurks a deep divide over the meaning of Allen Ginsberg himself.  Was he a heroic boundary-pusher?  Freedlander cites Ginsberg fan Steve Silberman.  Ginsberg, Silberman insisted,

thought that by bringing material into poetry that were previously considered unpoetic, he enlarged the poetic occupation.

Or was Ginsberg only typical of 1960s sexual excesses?  Conservatives might scoff at the notion that there is any true artistic merit in poetry that apotheosizes our most prurient sexual nature.  As usual, conservative educational icon Max Rafferty expressed in 1968 some of the most memorable anti-hippie bon mots.  He blasted the literary pretensions of “the lank-haired leaders of our current literati.”  Too many hippie protesters, Rafferty insisted, “look as though their main grievance was against the board of health.”  Young people needed more talk about sex, Rafferty believed, “about as much as Custer needed more Indians.”  Instead, Rafferty thought, literary education should focus on the tried-and-true guides to basic morals such as bravery, self-sacrifice, and honesty.

At the heart of this case, it seems, we find some tangled culture-war history.  As Andrew Hartman argues in his new book, the “1960s” serves as a flashpoint for continuing battles over morality and public policy.  If Ginsberg is a Great American Poet, then it does indeed seem short-sighted to punish a teacher for exposing students to his work.  If Ginsberg, on the other hand, was the dirty edge of a vapid adolescent “howl” of self-seeking hedonism, then teachers have a duty to protect children from such foul material.

What would you do?  Would you punish this teacher for a sex crime?  Would you perhaps forgive him for a momentary lapse in judgement?  Or, on the contrary, would you reward him for engaging his class in a bold and inspired moment of curricular bravery?

6 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 29, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 29, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/29/would-you-fire-this-teacher/

Are We Too Polite to Tell Our Children the Truth?

It’s not a secret. The roots of Memorial Day lie twisted with America’s toughest problems of race and region. But my hunch is that very few Memorial Day speeches mentioned such things. In addition to the vexing problems of knowledge and politics that cause our continuing educational culture wars, I think we need to add one surprisingly boring cause.

Historian David Blight has argued convincingly that the first Memorial Day (Decoration Day back then) was part of a furious effort by African American Southerners to defend the memory of Union soldiers buried in the South. On May 1, 1865, the first Memorial Day celebration took place on Washington Race Course in Charleston, South Carolina.

That first Memorial Day did not bring Americans together. It celebrated the victory of the Union. It celebrated the end of slavery. It used a display of African American military force to make the point to white Southerners that the old days were gone forever.

A dozen years later, of course, many of those white former Confederates had regained political power in the South. African American freedoms had been wrested away by vengeful white elites North and South. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Professor Blight tells us in Race & Reunion, North and South had come together to celebrate the heroics of white soldiers on both sides. Memorial Day had come to be a celebration of white unity, at the cost of African American rights.

What would YOU tell them?

What would YOU tell them?

Why don’t we tell any of that to our children? I think there are two obvious culprits and one surprisingly banal one.

Around these parts, local historians like to remind us that the official first Memorial Day took place in Waterloo, New York. In 1966, then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson decreed that Waterloo was the birthplace of the tradition. That’s a comforting story everyone can get behind. And it points out the many reasons why we don’t tell ourselves the story of the Charleston Race Track.

First, lots of us just don’t know. We might not have read Professor Blight’s book. In all fairness, we might assume that the history we get in our newspapers and from our parents is the truth.

Second, there has been significant political activism to make sure we don’t know. As Professor Blight detailed, organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked hard to obscure the race-conscious history of Memorial Day. In textbooks and historical markers, in schools and in Memorial-Day speeches, activists such as Mildred Rutherford insisted that the memory of the Confederacy must be honored.

What not to know and how not to know it...

What not to know and how not to know it…

But above and beyond ignorance and activism, there is a far more basic reason why we don’t talk much about the still-festering racial issues at the real root of Memorial Day. For those of us interested in educational culture wars, we can see the same operation at work in questions about evolution and sex education in public schools as well.

As I argue in my new book about conservative school activism in the twentieth century, conservatives have often had a very easy time vetoing ideas or methods in public-school classrooms or textbooks. Why? Because they didn’t have to disprove the ideas, they only had to insist that such ideas were controversial.

Public schools are surprisingly similar to polite dinner parties. Not because everyone’s manners are at their best, but because any topic that is perceived as controversial is taboo. Teachers will avoid it; administrators will recoil from it.

We’ve seen this over and over throughout the twentieth century, in subject after subject.

Here in scenic Binghamton, New York, for example, in 1940, school Superintendent Daniel Kelly yanked a set of history textbooks from the district’s classrooms. Why? Not because he disliked them. He told a reporter, “Personally, it’s the kind of book I want my children to have. To say it is subversive is absurd.” However, he was willing to get rid of them in order to “stop the controversy” about them.

A few years later, in 1942, an enterprising group of academics tried to determine why so few teachers taught evolution. They mailed a survey to a representative group of teachers nationwide. Overall, they found that fewer than half of America’s biology teachers taught anything close to recognizable evolutionary science. Why not? In the words of one of their respondents, “Controversial subjects are dynamite to teachers.”

When it comes to Memorial Day, this polite impulse to avoid controversy must be part of our loud silence about the roots of the holiday. Who wants to be the boor at the cookout who turns a sentimental get-together into a racial confrontation? Who is willing to tell the gathered Boy Scouts and VFW members that their parade is a charade, since it has its roots in the reinstitution of American racial slavery? Who is willing to tell kids in class that their long weekend is really a reminder of America’s long and continuing race war?

Such things are simply not done.

In addition to the obvious culture-war culprits of knowledge and politics, we need to remember this obvious fact: Teaching the truth is rude.

13 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 26, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, From the Archives, Schools in Black and White, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 26, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/26/are-we-too-polite-to-tell-our-children-the-truth/

Trigger . . . a Celebration

Do universities these days coddle their students? Do progressive dreams of inclusive campuses result in hothouse indignation? That’s the charge from pundits as students complain of hostile classrooms. Far from a problem, though, this trigger-warning brouhaha should be cause to celebrate, for two reasons.

Warning: Woman turns into a tree...

Warning: Woman turns into a tree…

In recent days, commentators have leaped upon a story from Columbia University. A group of students published a complaint about insensitive classrooms and professors. One student had been forced to endure a discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, replete with stories of rape and assault. The problem was not just Ovid. The students wrote,

like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

Even worse, when students complained about these texts, or suggested other authors such as Toni Morrison, they were pooh-poohed or dismissed.

Predictably, writers from a variety of religious and ideological backgrounds have pointed out some of the over-the-top elements of such student protests. Atheist author Jerry Coyne denounced the students’ “Literature Fascism.” Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan cussed the over-sensitivity of the “trigger-happy generation.”

Noonan pulled no punches. She blasted this “significant and growing form of idiocy” as something that must be addressed. “I notice lately,” Noonan goes on,

that some members of your generation are being called, derisively, Snowflakes. Are you really a frail, special and delicate little thing that might melt when the heat is on?

Do you wish to be known as the first generation that comes with its own fainting couch? Did first- and second-wave feminists march to the barricades so their daughters and granddaughters could act like Victorians with the vapors?

Everyone in America gets triggered every day. Many of us experience the news as a daily microaggression. Who can we sue, silence or censor to feel better?

Ouch. Before we talk about why these crusty columnists give us cause for celebration, let us make a few complaints. First, contra Noonan, this is not a generational thing. As SAGLRROILYBYGTH are keenly aware, Columbia and other elite schools are nearly beside the point when it comes to understanding the broad picture of higher education in this country. They attract a tremendously disproportionate share of commentator attention, but almost no one attends such schools.

And even in the calculated environment of Columbia, the student protesters represent only a tiny sliver of the student body. As Noonan smartly pointed out, the reaction from other Columbia students was not sympathetic. One student wrote, “These girls’ parents need a refund.”

Second, anyone of a certain age can attest to the fact that these same discussions have been happening—with different buzzwords—for the last fifty years. I remember my days as a student radical, back in the 1980s. Sure enough, at one of our indignant protest meetings with a dean, one student complained that the dean’s cigarette smoke was causing her some anguish. His response? Deal with it, Snowflake.   Nowadays, of course, I can’t imagine any college official smoking during a meeting, but the general tenor of student complaint was the same.

In spite of all that, this dustup over trigger warnings should give us cause for celebration. Why? First of all, it has brought together indignant “kids-these-days” jeremiads from all sides of our campus culture wars. Atheists and conservative Catholics, liberals and conservatives, Jerry Coynes and Peggy Noonans . . . a variety of pundits can agree that this sort of student activism is both silly and counterproductive. Any time we can have people from different culture-war perspectives agree on something, we can build on that.

Second, as historian Andrew Hartman has pointed out recently, simply having students who seem to care about Ovid and Toni Morrison is a refreshing sort of culture-war problem. Too often, those kinds of disputes over the proper types of college reading have been replaced by more frightening existential questions of whether or not colleges will fund literature departments.

So rejoice, all those who yearn for robust college campus life! When students are interested in the morals of their reading lists, we might suspect that they are actually doing the reading. When students come together to protest against campus policies, we might hope that they will remain active citizens as they age and fatten. And finally, whenever an issue can bring together curmudgeonly elders from a variety of culture-war positions, there is hope that we all can continue to have robust, controversial conversations.

25 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 24, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 24, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/24/trigger-a-celebration/

Would You Buy Cookies from a Girl with a Penis?

It is difficult to ask that kind of question, because we don’t like to think about children and sexuality at the same time. It’s even more awkward, since we don’t seem quite sure what we mean when we say “boy” and “girl.” Recently the Girl Scouts announced their continuing policy to allow transgender girls to participate in scouting. Today in the Christian Post we see some explanation of why religious conservatives dislike it.

As SAGLRROILYBYGTH are well aware, ideas about gender are among the most contentious in today’s culture wars. We’ve recently seen in these pages a productive interchange across the culture-war trenches.

...can we talk?

…can we talk?

In general—and I’m painting with a broad brush here—conservatives tend to see gender as a God-given and immutable part of human identity. People are born male or female, just as God created them. On a more sophisticated level, conservative intellectuals might look askance at gender-bending ideas as merely the latest efflorescence of cultural degeneration. When Rome rotted, for example, sophisticated Romans scoffed at old ideas about divinity and sexuality. The moral thing to do, with this mindset, is to fight all attempts to blur the bright line between boys and girls.

On the other side, progressives—including your humble editor—tend to see gender as more fluid. People are born with a wide spectrum of biological parts. Babies are assigned one gender at birth, based usually on their dominant physical sex characteristics. That assigned gender does not always match a person’s true gender, or a person may not identify with any particular gender at all. In this mindset, the moral thing to do is to recognize and value the ways people discover and identify their own genders.

The Girl Scouts now officially agree with this position. As their “Chief Girl Expert” explained recently, they have decided to recognize girls as those young people who identify as girls, regardless of external biological characteristics and regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth. As she put it,

If a girl is recognized by her family, school and community as a girl and lives culturally as a girl, Girl Scouts is an organization that can serve her in a setting that is both emotionally and physically safe.  Inclusion of transgender girls is handled at a council level on a case by case basis, with the welfare and best interests of all members as a top priority.

What’s wrong with that? The socially conservative American Family Association started a petition to encourage the Girl Scouts to change their minds. As the AFA explained,

This means girls in the organization will be forced to recognize and accept transgenderism as a normal lifestyle. Boys in skirts, boys in make-up and boys in tents will become a part of the program. This change will put young innocent girls at risk.

Adults are willing to experiment on our kids – both the boys who are confused and the girls who will wonder why a boy in a dress is in the bathroom with them.

The Girl Scouts of America has lost its moral compass and needs your encouragement to rescind this new policy. Since 2003, bad policies like this have resulted in GSA’s enrollment dropping by over one million girls, almost 27% of its membership.

In this statement we can see what some conservatives object to in the Girl Scouts’ decision. First, the AFA says that this decision will normalize transgenderism. Fair enough, I think. But to folks like me, that seems like a good goal. To some conservatives, it does not. To the AFA, transgender girls are not brave people who have worked hard to wrestle with fundamental questions about their true selves. Rather, they are “boys in skirts. . . . boys who are confused.” For many conservatives, this notion that transgender girls are really boys seems enormously powerful.

Also, the AFA charges that these masquerading boys will be put in intimate and potentially sexual contact (“boys in tents”) with “real” girls. Just as we’ve seen elsewhere when the question of transgender youth comes up, there is worry among conservatives that the inherent aggressive sexuality of males will put “young innocent girls at risk.”

Moreover, these sinister changes are not merely accidental. According to the AFA, they are the calculated efforts of wrong-headed progressive adults. As I argue in my new book, this accusation against progressives’ proclivity to engage in dangerous experimentation on kids has a long history. In this conservative mindset, progressivism isn’t just wrong, it is dangerous to children.

Finally, in this AFA petition we see an appeal to a bedrock conservative notion. The AFA accuses the Girl Scouts of having lost their “moral compass.” Just as with our cultural disagreements over the notion of gender itself, conservatives and progressives tend to disagree over the idea of a moral compass. For many conservatives, we know—and have always known—the distinction between right and wrong. The rules have been laid out for millennia. When organizations change or challenge those rules, some conservatives think, they have willfully abandoned those God-given rules.

Progressives, for their part, tend to value the ability to adapt to changing and unique circumstances.  What is the morally correct thing to do?  In general, we should value all persons, regardless of their differences.  In this case, that means welcoming transgender girls into the Girl Scouts.  To do otherwise would be cruel and immorally rigid.

Predictably, it will be very difficult to communicate when we have such fundamental disagreements.  Predictably, progressives will accuse conservatives of hatred and bigotry. Conservatives will accuse progressives of encouraging sexual license among children. Both accusations are intensely hurtful. Who wants to be a bigot? Who wants to be a pimp?

Isn’t there any better way to have this discussion?

6 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 21, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 21, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/21/would-you-buy-cookies-from-a-girl-with-a-penis/

Loving your Homosexual Neighbor: Hell or Rapture?

Why are our culture wars so durable? In his new book American Apocalypse, historian Matthew A. Sutton argues that the answer lies in the end of the world. But more evidence keeps piling up that there is a different answer, a better explanation. For some conservative religious people, the culture wars are about more than just winning elections or improving schools. The fight for America’s soul is nothing less than a battle to save people from eternal torment.

I Love You but It's the End of the World...?

I Love You but It’s the End of the World…?

Professor Sutton’s book is really terrific. He examines the history of what he calls “radical evangelical” belief as it emerged in the twentieth century. Unlike most historians, he doesn’t ignore important aspects of the radical evangelical family, such as Pentecostals and African Americans. The part that I’m struggling with is Prof. Sutton’s definition of radical evangelicalism. At its heart, Sutton says, American fundamentalism can be understood as

radical apocalyptic evangelicalism. . . . fundamentalists’ anticipation of the soon-coming apocalypse made them who they were.

In other words, Professor Sutton thinks that the heart and soul of fundamentalist belief comes from beliefs about the imminent and cataclysmic apocalypse. Our American culture wars are so virulent, he explains in chapter four, because fundamentalists and other radical evangelicals believe that they will be judged soon by a righteous God. They must fight against immoral movies, immoral booze, and other immoral trends because such things are part of the seductive Satanic lure of the end days.

Certainly, ideas of Bible prophecy and apocalypse are central to fundamentalist belief. But are they really as central as Professor Sutton contends? Are there other ideas that are even more important?

We stumbled across an evangelical warning this morning that raises the question again. In the pages of World Magazine, conservative evangelical Andree Seu Peterson explains why fundamentalists can’t relax. She does not mention the coming apocalypse. To Peterson’s way of thinking, there is a different reason why fundamentalists must continue fighting culture wars.

Peterson warns that things have changed fast in the last ten years. For conservatives, the question of homosexuality used to be cut-and-dried. Ten years ago, she says,

homosexuality was fringy and dangerous and you were dead set against it. Today homosexuality is the guy grilling steaks next door, waving to you over the picket fence, calling, “How about those Phillies!”

Conservatives might be tempted to accept homosexuals as part of God’s family. Christians might be tempted to love their neighbors, as Christ commanded. In secular terms, we might say, conservatives might feel pressure to adapt their beliefs to changing cultural norms.

Such thinking is dangerous, Peterson warns. Not because the world will be ending soon, but for a more basic reason, a reason more fundamental to fundamentalists. If you really care about your neighbor, Peterson explains,

If you want to talk about “love your neighbor,” need we mention that neighbors don’t let neighbors go to hell? … What good is all the good will you reap now when in the future Mr. Steak Griller next door curses you from across the chasm for your quiet complicity in his damnation?

When it comes to culture wars, this I-Love-You-but-You’re-Going-to-Hell logic is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Whenever religious conservatives might be tempted to relax, to get along, to go with the flow, they can remind themselves of the eternal dangers of compromise. Even when it seems as if the kind thing to do, the loving thing to do, is to meet our neighbors in the middle, such apparent kindness, to some religious conservative, is a terrible mistake.

For some conservative religious people, culture-war issues are not just about accepting our neighbors’ “alternate lifestyles.” If they were, then we could all just get along. As Peterson tells the tale, we could all just smile and wave at one another, then go our separate ways. But for some conservatives, the culture wars have eternal stakes. If they don’t win, they will be guilty of sending people straight to hell.

Is that related to the apocalypse? Sure. Sorta. If Jesus will be returning sometime soon, suddenly and without warning, then these questions of damnation become even more urgent. But it is the damnation itself that is the crucial idea.

For those of us outside the circle of conservative evangelical belief, it can be difficult to understand the vital importance of the idea of damnation to evangelicals. For those of us who don’t believe in a real and terrifying hell, it can be easy to miss the enormous implications of such an idea. The apocalypse is only scary because of the threat of eternal damnation. The culture wars are only worth fighting if we can save some souls from such torment. Missionary work is only crucial because we need to spread the light as far as we can. Indeed, rather than defining fundamentalism as the radical evangelical belief in the apocalypse, we might better define fundamentalism as the radical evangelical belief in a real, eternal, and difficult-to-avoid Hell.

Certainly everyone interested in the nature of fundamentalism and culture wars should read Professor Sutton’s book. And maybe someone can explain to me what I’m missing. It seems to me, though, that the central idea to understanding what makes fundamentalists unique is hell, not just the coming apocalypse.

20 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 17, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Required Reading, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 17, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/17/loving-your-homosexual-neighbor-hell-or-rapture/

Is This Progressive College Anti-Science?

How do you know your gender?  At the conservative Weekly Standard last week, Jonathan Last took Smith College to task for leftist anti-science when it came to gender identification.  Are Last’s accusations fair?

First, some background.  Smith College, an historic women-only school in western Massachusetts, has finalized its position on transgender students.  In short, the leaders at Smith decided on what we might call a “past-the-gate” rule.  If a student identifies as a woman when she applies, she may be admitted.  This is true no matter what gender she was assigned at birth.  If, however, someone identifies as a woman as a freshman, but transitions to a man during his time at Smith, he will be permitted to remain, even though Smith maintains its women-only rule.

Make sense?  In other words, the leaders at Smith want to recognize students’ right to identify their own genders.  It is not biological hardware that determines gender, Smith agrees, but rather a person’s identification.

Is this anti-science?  Last thinks so.  As he puts it, this decision

has shown that the left’s allegiance to capital-“S” Science is only a sometimes thing. Progressives believe that science contains the definitive answers to all questions—except when it doesn’t, and we must accept the idea of deep, human truths, which might contradict science.

Of course, anyone who spends time with culture-war issues knows that the Left embraces plenty of anti-science.  There are lots of progressives who oppose vaccines and genetically modified food.  But this transgender case seems trickier.

Last accuses Smith of ignoring the claims of science.  He implies that the scientifically verifiable claims of biology should be given more weight than people’s subjective ideas about their true gender identification.

Deluded? Or scientific?

Deluded? Or scientific?

Now, maybe I’m blinded by my progressive prejudices here, but isn’t there a scientific reason to believe that gender is something beyond simple biology?  In other words, we may be born with primary and secondary sexual characteristics, but there is a divide between having certain biological characteristics and identifying as a particular gender.

So Last’s accusation raises an interesting question.  If we view gender identification as merely a belief, a feeling, or a choice, then Smith College’s decision seems to place those non-scientific things above scientific proofs.  But if we trust mainstream scientists such as those at the American Psychological Association, gender identity is something more.

So who are the real anti-scientists here?  Conservative intellectuals who deny the internal aspects of gender identity?  Or progressive college leaders who ignore biological verities to respect students’ preferences?

29 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 11, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 11, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/11/is-this-progressive-college-anti-science/

Sex Sells, but Who’s Buying?

The kids are alright. And if they’re not, all of our culture-war fuss ‘n’ stuff over sex in schools is not making too much of a difference. Thanks to the inestimable Jonathan Zimmerman, Binghamton University last night enjoyed a mind-blowing discussion of sex education worldwide. Among the many takeaway lessons, Professor Zimmerman argued that culture-war fulminations about sex ed generally have only a very tenuous relationship to what children actually learn about sex.

As the sophisticated and good-looking regular readers of I Love You but You’re Going to Hell (SAGLRROILYBYGTH) are well aware, sex education has long been a lightning rod for controversy in the USA. Liberal activists insist that this is literally a life-and-death matter, with the rise of HIV and unplanned pregnancies. For their part, conservatives have blasted liberal efforts as something akin to child pornography. Or even as a scheme by sex predators to loosen up the victims.

In his talk last night on the scenic campus of Binghamton University, Prof. Zimmerman shared some of his work from his new book, Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education. Over the course of the twentieth century, sex education has spread around the world, led in many ways by pioneers in the United States. What people have wanted out of sex ed, and the shape sex ed has taken, have continually been subject to withering debate.

Who's for it?

Who’s for it?

Sex ed—and fights over sex ed—have a long history, back to about 1914. But things changed radically with the introduction of HIV. Since that time, everyone involved has agreed that sex ed is a drastic necessity. But there have been bitter disagreements about what sex ed should look like.

Two distinct types of missionary outreach have competed for global influence. On one hand, we have what might be called the “health and autonomy” position. Advocates of this type of sex ed—which, for the record, is generally something your humble editor supports—want children to have maximum information about sex. This might be touchy, but children need to learn how sex works. Perhaps more important, children need to learn to assert control over their own sexuality. Coerced and risky sex are the twin scourges against which effective sex education should be designed to fight.

On the other side, conservatives have preached a moral approach, something we might call the “just say no” school. Around the world, activists have insisted that the best offense in the case of sex is a good defense. If traditional courtship patterns can be preserved, if sex can be something done only within the bounds of a heterosexual marriage, then the blights of disease and exploitation can be eliminated.

From New York to Auckland, Dhaka to Copenhagen, these sorts of culture wars over sex education have raged for a generation. During that time, leaders and organizations have come and gone. Buzzwords and strategies have mutated and metastasized.

One thing that has not changed, according to the good professor, was that the sex education curricula in public schools has not had much direct correlation to the ways young people learn about sex.

First of all, activists tend to debate official curricula, not actual learning. In other words, as with other educational culture-war issues such as evolution and school prayer, adults tend to fight over the official standards for what should be taught in public-school classrooms. In practice, there is a vast and unmeasured distance between official learning standards and real classroom learning.

Also, even if we take official sex-ed curricula as our guide to what kids are learning, in the USA we don’t find much. At most, Professor Zimmerman explained, students in US public schools get about six hours per year of sex education.

It might be no surprise, then, that students don’t learn much about sex in school. Since the 1920s, Professor Zimmerman told us, students have put school near the bottom of their lists of places they learn about sex. Consistently, students respond that they glean about five percent of their knowledge about sex from their classes in school. Five percent! That means that almost all of their sex education takes place outside the classroom walls.

Yet time and again, both sides in our tumultuous sex-ed culture wars have issued dire warnings about the importance of public-school sex-education programs. Do such programs matter? Certainly. But too often, culture-war activists make cataclysmic claims about the positive or negative effects of school programs. And too often, these claims are about building political careers and establishing public profiles, rather than helping kids learn.

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on May 2, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on May 2, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/05/02/sex-sells-but-whos-buying/

The Coming Split at Conservative Colleges

Is your school for bigots?…Or for apostates? That’s the choice that conservative school leaders have faced throughout the twentieth century. And it is coming round again. As the US Supreme Court hears arguments about same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, conservative religious schools and colleges should gear up for another divisive debate over equality and theology. If SCOTUS rules in favor of same-sex marriage, will evangelical and fundamentalist schools face a return to the hot tempers of 1971?

More bad news for conservatives...

More bad news for conservatives…

The case itself is a combination of cases from four states. In short, SCOTUS is trying to decide two issues: whether or not the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriage; and whether or not same-sex marriages in one state must be recognized by all states.

Conservative Christians have made their feelings clear. Among the hundreds of friend-of-the-court letters are one from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and one from Governor Mike Huckabee’s advocacy group.

At the Christian Post this morning, we see nervous worries about the possible fall-out for conservative Christian schools. Justice Samuel Alito made an explicit reference to the precedent on every conservative’s mind: the Bob Jones University case. Back in 1970, the leaders of BJU refused to allow racial integration on their South Carolina campus. As a result, the Internal Revenue Service took away BJU’s tax-exempt status. By 1983, BJU had taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost.

Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli if the precedent would apply:

JUSTICE ALITO:  Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating.  So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­ sex marriage?

GENERAL VERRILLI:  You know, I ­­ I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. ­ I don’t deny that.  I don’t deny that, Justice Alito.  It is ­­ it is going to be an issue.

Conservatives worry that this might mean the end of religious schools and colleges. Should religious schools refuse to provide housing for same-sex married couples, the federal government could revoke their tax-exempt status. For most schools, that would mean a sudden and impossibly steep tax bill. When schools are already teetering on the brink of financial insolvency, it could certainly mean the end.

But that’s not all. If history is any guide, Christian school leaders should also prepare for another kind of crisis. Back in the 1970s, fundamentalist schools endured a vicious and destructive split over Bob Jones University’s position on racial segregation.

As I’ve been finding in the archives this past year, even schools that agreed with BJU’s fundamentalist theology sometimes disagreed with BJU’s position against interracial marriage. At the Moody Bible Institute, for example, leaders decided to cancel an invitation to pro-BJU fundamentalist leader John R. Rice. The decision subjected MBI’s leaders to withering criticism from fundamentalists nationwide.

Reporters and observers have noted that SCOTUS’s decision in this case might raise questions for leaders of conservative religious schools. Those leaders should also consider another likely outcome. If SCOTUS’s decision puts pressure on school leaders to recognize same-sex marriages, it might lead to another in a long line of bitter fights among schools.

Will conservative evangelicals and Catholics submit to the law of the land? Or will they resist, citing a higher authority? Will conservative schools lose their conservative credibility if they give in to the new cultural ethos?

It’s not going to be an easy choice. If I were the president of a conservative Christian school or college, I’d get myself ready for a lose-lose decision. Do I want my school to be labeled a bunch of fanatical bigots? Or would I prefer to join the ranks of schools that don’t take their religions very seriously?

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by Adam Laats on April 30, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 30, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/04/30/the-coming-split-at-conservative-colleges/

Hoosiers, Hate, and Homosexuality

When Charles Barclay, Miley Cyrus, Hillary Clinton, and Apple all attack Indiana, you know something big is going down. Many liberals have condemned Indiana’s new religious liberty law as a thinly veiled attack on LGBT rights. Not so fast, says Boston University’s Stephen Prothero. He raises a key question for all of us interested in culture-war issues. Who gets to define what is and what isn’t a religious act?

Defending liberty? Or spreading hate?

Defending liberty? Or spreading hate?

Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act has been reviled as a sneaky way to impose a kind of cultural segregation on gay couples. If a baker does not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, for example, or if a photographer refuses to shoot the pictures, this law gives them some legal protection to do so.

With these intentions, it certainly seems like an intolerant stab at the rights and dignity of LGBT people.

Yet liberal scholar Stephen Prothero defends the law. He is a supporter of full equality and rights for LGBT citizens, but he thinks conservative religious types have every right to refuse service to religious ceremonies of which they disapprove.  Not to refuse service in secular affairs, but to refuse service to religious ceremonies.  As he puts it,

There is no excuse for refusing to serve a lesbian couple at a restaurant and to my knowledge no state RFRA has ever been used to justify such discrimination. But if we favor liberty for all Americans (and not just for those who agree with us), we should be wary of using the coercive powers of government to compel our fellow citizens to participate in rites that violate their religious beliefs. We would not force a Jewish baker to make sacramental bread for a Catholic Mass. Why would we force a fundamentalist baker to make a cake for a gay wedding?

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of Professor Prothero’s work. I’m looking forward to his upcoming book, Why Liberals Win. In this op-ed, Prothero raises a key question that ranges far beyond the narrow issue of Indiana’s RFRA and discrimination against LGBT couples.

Namely, who decides when and if something is a religious act? If a lesbian couple gets married in a secular ceremony, is that a religious act? Or, to be specific, is it fair for a religious person to define such a ceremony as a religious act, even if the people involved don’t see it as one?

Here’s another real-world example: Is the teaching of evolution a religious act, even if the teacher does not see it as such? That is, if such teaching has religious meaning to a religious student, does that make it a religious act?  Obviously, public-school teachers have no business committing religious acts in their classrooms.  But what if they don’t think it is a religious act?  Who decides?

These cumbersome distinctions matter. As Professor Prothero points out, no one wants to force a Jewish baker to do anything to affirm a Catholic ceremony. But traditionally, legally, and historically, it has been acceptable to force a Jewish baker to do things that are perceived as non-religious, such as following health codes or serving customers of all races.

Defining the boundaries of religious activity thus takes on enormous political heft. If your actions are religious to me, even if they do not feel religious to you, who gets to decide?

In the checkered history of America’s public schools, time and again these disputes have been resolved against the claims of religious minorities. As I argue in my upcoming evolution book with philosopher Harvey Siegel, in the nineteenth century Catholic activists were told by Protestant school leaders that their complaints lacked merit, since the Protestant Bible could never be objectionable. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, Native American students had their religions suppressed in government boarding schools, since their religious objections were not seen by school founders as legitimate. In light of this history, shouldn’t religious minority groups, including creationists, be allowed to define for themselves if certain topics count as religious?

So far, conservative religious folks have not had too much luck in arguing in favor of their rights to discriminate. Perhaps most famously, Bob Jones University lost its Supreme Court case against the Internal Revenue Service. BJU had had its racial segregation challenged. BJU insisted its stance was religious. BJU lost.

If Indiana’s law is intended to protect conservatives’ right to discriminate, will it go the way of racial segregation? Do conservatives have the right to define the nature of religion, even if other people disagree? Is it fair for conservatives (or anyone) to insist that something is a religious act, even if the people engaged in that act don’t think so?

11 Comments
by Adam Laats on March 31, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on March 31, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/03/31/hoosiers-hate-and-homosexuality/

Getting Stoned at Bob Jones University

Is it now okay to be gay at fundamentalist Bob Jones University? Last week, former president and current chancellor Bob Jones III apologized for vicious anti-gay rhetoric from 1980. But this does not mean that homosexuality is now an accepted thing at BJU.

Time to celebrate?

Time to celebrate?

For those like me outside the orbit of fundamentalist colleges, the cultural politics of BJU can come as a shock. BJU has a long history of holding out against progressive social trends. Until the twenty-first century, for example, the South Carolina university proudly opposed interracial marriage.

As I’m finding as I research Bob Jones and other fundamentalist colleges, BJU has always been an outlier. The family leadership has a long tradition, when challenged, of doubling down on its own opinions as God’s Truth. Any criticism from within or without merely strengthened the leaders’ resolve. Again and again, this has led to purges of dissenting faculty, students, and administrators.

For those in the know, then, the recent apology for anti-homosexual rhetoric seems like another welcome change. In a press release, BJIII responded to a petition from a gay-rights group at BJU. In 1980, at a White House press conference, then-president BJIII suggested that the appropriate punishment for homosexuality was stoning. Here’s what he said back then:

I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted. But it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.

In his recent apology, BJIII distanced himself from such shocking language. As he put it,

I take personal ownership of this inflammatory rhetoric. This reckless statement was made in the heat of a political controversy 35 years ago. It is antithetical to my theology and my 50 years of preaching a redeeming Christ Who came into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Upon now reading these long-forgotten words, they seem to me as words belonging to a total stranger—were my name not attached.

So can gay people at BJU now come out of their fundamentalist closets? Apparently not. As anti-fundamentalist Jonny Scaramanga noted, BJIII’s apology still condemned homosexuality. The statement apologized for the threat of stoning, not for labeling homosexuality a sin. BJIII carefully noted that he did not believe stoning was the appropriate punishment for “sinners.” He never apologized for considering homosexuality itself a sin.

Nevertheless, as the response from the gay-rights group BJU Unity makes clear, homosexuals are part of the BJU community. As I’m finding in my current research, they always have been. BJIII’s apology is not nothing, but it does not welcome homosexuals openly into BJU’s fundamentalist family.

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by Adam Laats on March 26, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, Teaching Sex and Sexuality
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on March 26, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/03/26/getting-stoned-at-bob-jones-university/

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