Tuesday 23 February 2010

"Dangerous To Children"

If the Sex Education peddled in county schools is not very manifestly that, then what is? Of course, the whole point of it is to encourage children into sexual activity with each other and with adults. It is grooming, but at public expense and of a captive audience. Mass abortion and the ravages of the clap, or worse, are regarded as prices worth paying by children for perverted adult indulgence.

By all means teach civil partnerships, a bare legal fact. They do not need to be consummated, so encourage pupils to discuss why they are restricted to unrelated same-sex couples. That should be a fairly short discussion, since there is no good reason for that restriction.

And teach Natural Family Planning. The idea that NFP "does not work" seems to be widely viewed as on par with the idea that exercise is good for you: a statement of the obvious. But in fact, not only does even the slightest thought demonstrate that, properly practised, NFP must be effective, but its very high reliability, greater than that of any artificial means, is duly admitted even by the World Health Organisation, which is hardly a Vatican puppet, to say the very least.

The problem that NFP's detractors have with it is not that it is ineffective but that it can only be used effectively by a faithful married couple. A couple, moreover, who run next to no risk of divorce, which is as good as unheard of among NFP users, something that certainly cannot be said simply of Catholics (which not all NFP users are), or even of Catholics with strong views on divorce. This is so far removed from the detractors' own experience that they are intellectually and emotionally unable to cope with it.

Or is it just that women must poison themselves in order to be available constantly for the sexual gratification of men? That is right down there in the depths of misogyny with the suggestion that the preborn child is simultaneously part of a woman's body (indeed, of her very reproductive system) and insentient.

10 comments:

  1. "Greater than that of any artificial means". I'm sorry, says who? The Pope?

    Two parts of the Bible are often quoted to show God's disapproval of birth control:

    * First, God commanded his people to "Be fruitful and multiply," and contraception is seen as specifically flouting this instruction.
    * Second, Onan was killed by God for "spilling his seed," which is often taken as divine condemnation of coitus interruptus.

    There are at least two interpretations of the second example:

    * God may have been angry with Onan for having sex for a purpose other than having children

    * God may not have been angry with Onan for preventing conception but for failing to honour a commandment to produce a child with his dead brother's wife
    o the act that Jewish law required Onan to perform would nowadays be regarded as rape, since the widow's consent was not required - and this makes the story a very dubious foundation for moral argument

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  2. "I'm sorry, says who? The Pope?"

    The WHO, for a start. That, and sheer common sense.

    Catholicism is not fundamentalism, and vice versa.

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  3. And this perverted obsession with children and sex is precisely why you are banned from every school in the North East. Would make MP's school visits a bit awkward

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  4. I most certainly am not. If anything, you are probably thinking of certain of my critics.

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  5. Good to see how far they are sinking as their majority in this and 50 other seats disappears before their very eyes on the Catholic issue.

    Unlike in most of those seats, we have someone else specifically to vote for. You.

    Banned from schools? Holy Mother Church is considering you for another govenorship.

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  6. Oh, if I'd want it. It is very time-consuming considering that it is completely voluntary. Worth it, though.

    Holy Mother Church has never forgiven my removal last time, at the insistence of a politician who hated Catholic schools and who in any case was subsequently banned by his own party from seeking re-election. He now appears to have, as the saying goes, "withdrawn from public life".

    It's the pointing out that the media glorify, and that the Police (still less the CPS) rarely pursue, the acts in question: now, that is what they really, really, really don't like...

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  7. I think it's your mentioning grammar schools that really riles them. The thing they fear most as a class. That, and the general emergence of Labour's real right wing again.

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  8. Less of the "right wing", please.

    And less of the "Labour", as a party. We need to see that the only way forward is the way beyond the existing parties.

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  9. Anonymous says:
    I'm sorry, says who? The Pope?

    Two parts of the Bible are often quoted to show God's disapproval of birth control:


    ..and then goes on to quote two parts of the bible which have little if anything to do with Catholic teaching on contraception!

    Of course, the problem is that many people are just as ignorant as 'Anonymous'. Which is why, in order to meet the new criteria of equality and respect, the state sector will need to spend a lot of money training its PHSCE teachers in Catholic teaching.

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  10. There's a gap in the market for the resources. Just keep the CES away from these things.

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