[Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: When teen sex education goes too far - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  When teen sex education goes too far

By Ellen Goodman  |  February 24, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SOME YEARS AGO, Rolling Stone magazine published a survey on the 
attitudes of baby boomer parents. The gist of it was that the people who 
had gone through the sexual revolution did everything, regretted 
nothing, and wanted their children to do none of it.

This didn't surprise me. Nothing changes your perspective as much as 
becoming a parent, and the first order of child-raising is protection. I 
remember Hillary Clinton's wry sexual advice back when she was first 
lady and the mother of a teenager: ''My theory is don't do it before 
you're 21, and then don't tell me about it."

Today parents of teens, boomers, and Gen-Xers alike are often whiplashed 
by the culture. With one eye, they watch the media sexualizing younger 
and younger children. With the other, they read the blinking warning 
signals of danger, from pregnancy to disease to AIDS.

In the midst of this, the loudest promises of protection have come from 
those pushing an abstinence-only education for schoolchildren that, in 
effect, is fear-of-sex education. And now we have another product from 
the protection racketeers: the notion that any and all sexual activity 
by teenagers should be treated as sexual abuse.

Welcome, Auntie Em, to Kansas.

As I write this, the citizens of the prototypically red state are 
awaiting a judge's verdict on one of the more bizarre cases to make its 
R-rated way into the public eye. Kansas is one of 12 states in which 
underage sex -- under 16 in this case -- is a crime even when it 
involves teenage peers. In 2003, state Attorney General Phill Kline, a 
bandstanding prolifer, interpreted that law to require doctors, 
educators, counselors, and healthcare workers to report virtually all 
sexual activity by those under 16 to the state.

The Kline Theory goes something like this: If sexual activity between 
teens is illegal, there's no such thing as consensual sex, and thus 
every act is harmful. These acts, by the way, include ''any lewd 
fondling or touching of the person . . . with the intent to arouse or 
satisfy the sexual desires." In short, healthcare workers have to rat on 
15-year-old sexual criminals who are lustily and mutually ''abusing" 
each other in the back seat of a Toyota.

The healthcare workers sued, and the recent trial produced some pretty 
odd exchanges. When lawyer Bonnie Scott Jones of the Center for 
Reproductive Rights put Kline on the stand, she asked if anything beyond 
kissing was acceptable. Is oral sex performed by a boy a reportable 
crime? Yes, said Kline. Oral sex performed by a girl? ''I'm not 
certain," he said.

There was also the testimony of Dr. Elizabeth Shadigian, best known as a 
stalwart of the abortion-gives-you-breast-cancer misinformation 
campaign. She said that teenage girls are always the victims of sexual 
activity because ''there's always a power differential between a boy and 
a girl." When girls have sex, they aren't doing, she said, ''they have 
been done to."

Frankly, I hadn't heard this argument since the late Andrea Dworkin 
maintained that all intercourse was rape. Radical feminism meets the 
radical right in the Puritan revival.

I assume that Kline's real purpose in mandating reports is to scare 
teens away from birth control and abortion clinics. If Kansas actually 
believed that all under-16 sex was harmful, why would it allow 
13-year-olds to marry? But the most sensible remark came from the 
exasperated Judge J. Thomas Marten who insistently asked the state: 
''Where is the clear, credible evidence that underage sex is always 
injurious?"

This is what passes for a radical question these days. In defense 
against a culture that is sexually provocative, the dominant messages 
are sexually overprotective: They run the gamut from ''just say no" to 
''just say not now." The focus today is on unhealthy sexual activity. 
It's become virtually taboo to even ask: What is healthy sexual activity 
for a teenager?

In Kansas, instead of homing in on real sexual abuse of children, they 
are redefining all underage sex as abuse. As for the notion that girls 
are invariably victims of sex, unable to consent to ''lewd fondling": Do 
we want to return to those wonderful yesteryears when women were 
supposed to be sexually inert until their wedding night when they 
magically became eager sexual partners?

Phill Kline has produced the ''Reefer Madness" of teenage sexuality. I 
can only hope that the judge overturns the idea that health workers and 
educators have to report petting as if it were pedophilia.

In the meantime, worried parents need to explore what we wish, as well 
as what we fear for our children. We need guides as we navigate the 
tricky shoals of adolescent sexuality between panic and protection. 
Let's begin with the simple edict: We're not in Kansas anymore.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/24/when_teen_sex_education_goes_too_far/
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