For several thousand years, sex education was simple: do it the way God says do it. However, that straightforward counsel began to undergo a major overhaul in 1964 with the formation of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, otherwise known as SIECUS.
SIECUS was founded at the Kinsey Institute located on the campus of Indiana University. Named after the controversial “researcher” Alfred Kinsey, the Kinsey Institute focused their studies on sex, gender, and reproduction…though many of their findings were deeply flawed due to Kinsey’s own sexual perversions.
But Mr. Kinsey wasn’t the only contentious figure associated with the origins of SEICUS. The council received its first donation from none other than Hugh Hefner, the mind behind Playboy magazine, and the first president of SIECUS was a woman named Mary Calderone who had previously served as the medical director for Planned Parenthood.
The “dream team” had now been established….
In order to cast her work as heroic, Calderone first had to find a villain. When she announced her efforts to the world, she declared tradition and biblical values to be the undoing of our species:
“A new stage of evolution is breaking across the horizon and the task of educators is to prepare children to step into that new world. To do this, they must pry children away from old views and values, especially from biblical and other traditional forms of sexual morality – for religious laws or rules about sex were made on the basis of ignorance.”
So, basically, we were teaching sex wrong…and we were teaching sex wrong because God’s an idiot.
Sure….
Yet, her doctrines found immediate appeal. Within a decade, Playboy and Penthouse were moved from behind the counter to the front shelf. The Internet gave rise to instantaneous sexual gratification through its more than 40,000 websites dedicated to pornography. We’ve seen birth rates for teens (aged 15-19) more than double. And today, we’ve not only normalized bisexuality, homosexuality, and transsexuality, but our culture seems constantly confused by its biologically-assigned gender.
We can’t be surprised. That’s what happens when we “upgrade” our sex education from God’s perfect plan.
Can we just go back to Sex Education 1.0?
Resource’s Origin:
Religion Saves + Nine Other Misconceptions by Mark Driscoll. Crossway Books, 2009, Pages 129-130.