Teaching Contracaption in Schools

While all people have some capacity for reasoning, a brief survey of world history makes it clear that man is not a rational animal. A glance at today's news confirms it: a President who lied his people into an unnecessary war and has virtually bankrupted his country is re-elected because he claims to be a Christian and appeals to the irrational core of fear that lurks inside of every human being.

This criticism of President Bush is not gratuitous, because the theme of this paper can only be fairly examined in light of the current veneer of religiosity worn the Republican party, and their recent electorial success.

The fundamentalist assault on sexuality and women in particular is not a new phenomenon. It is St. Paul who bears key responsibility for introducing a new emphasis on the evils of sexuality into Christian doctrine in the 1st century CE, after having enjoyed a playboy's lifestyle in his youth. But orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam are equally strict in their emphasis of draconian penalties for what they regard as sexual transgressions, since all three faiths share a common historical root.

Man has always created his own culture, upon which his survival depends. But the same winnowing process that assures that only the best technology survives does not necessarily apply in the realm of culture. Scientific advances have produced reactionary responses from religious

Leaders at least since Galileo was forced to recant his belief that the Earth revolved

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nt (the rebirth of ancient non-Christian knowledge in the Renaissance, as well as the rise of rationalism, science, and the critical spirit that has formed the modern, secular world) and those of religion. The Bush administration has denied funding to UNESCO to disseminate birth control devices, procedures, and information in the Third World. Estimates put the number of needlessly dead women as the result of botched illegal abortions in the thousands in countries where the UN had formerly routinely provided full family planning services before the Reagan administration put a stop to it. Small surprise that the current Republicans would deny America's teenagers a chance to learn about their bodies, and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies, for reasons based on spurious religious grounds. From the point of view of people who are not so mesmerized by fundamentalist preachers and politicians, this is an unmitigated disaster. Advocates for sexual and family planning education in the public schools such as Planned Parenthood, whose clinics have been fire-bombed and whose medical practitioners have been threatened or even killed by fundamentalists, eloquently describe the harm and futility of the fundamentalist approach of burying one's

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