Episcopalians on Sex

Let's Make Sex a Lot More Heartless

Could this Episcopalian youth counselor be any more wrongheaded? He sees that young people are forever experiencing pregnancy scares and unwanted pregnancies, but what a depressing set of conclusions he's drawn about what we need to teach them on the subject. Why, he wonders, do so many "bright, educated young people" find "such flimsy excuses for not using contraception, even when contraceptive devices are easily available"? After passing de rigueur observation that we as a society haven't managed to make contraception cheap enough, he concludes that other compulsions are operating: young people more or less consciously choose to forgo contraception, in part because they cling to "myths" about the meaning of sex.

He explains his own state of mind as a reckless young teenager knocking up his girlfriend. The stirring words from Macbeth were in his mind: "But here, on this bank and shoal of time, we’d jumped the life to come." What this meant to him was:

It seemed desperately romantic (remember, I was 17). As awful and as risky as what Macbeth and his wife were doing, they were doing it together, as a couple, bonding themselves together in their mutual sin. And as my girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves around each other, unable to get enough of one another, I remember thinking “I’m willing to risk everything for this — and the life I’m willing to jump is my own, my future.” Like so many young people in this same situation, I was briefly intoxicated with thoughts of a life together with a baby. My gal and I would always be together, would be unable to part, if we made a child together, or so I believed.

So he knocked her up, and a couple of months later he was doing the responsible thing, paying for her abortion. The moral he draws?

But we often forget that for some young people, the use of contraception not only symbolizes caution, it can come to symbolize a lack of complete and utter trust. . . . [What we need is] honest discussion about the romantic myths we attach to sex, particularly to intercourse: myths about fusion, myths about commitment, myths about what it means to have sex without barriers. . . . The sex education we need is about more than “protection.” It’s about more than providing access to abortion as a last resort, thought that remains an important component of justice-centered sex ed. Proper education will center on what sex means and what it doesn’t. And we can start by gently, firmly, and lovingly tearing down the myth that unprotected heterosexual intercourse represents the most intimate and magical expression of trust and love. Until we deconstruct that lie, we only tempt the unprepared to jump too quickly the lives they have to come.

Wow. Abortion is an important part of justice-centered sex ed. But not as important as disabusing young people of any notions that sex is about fusion, commitment, responsibility, love, or engendering helpless infants who will deserve loving protection from both parents. Glad we cleared that up! But I think I'd rather spend time with the kids who haven't gotten the message yet.