36) SEX-ED: Should sex education be taught in government schools?

Prophetic Statements

First Presidency Message

We believe that serious hazards are involved in entrusting to the schools the teaching of this vital and important subject to our children. This responsibility cannot wisely be left to society, nor the schools; nor can the responsibility be shifted to the Church. It is the responsibility of parents to see that they fully perform their duty in this respect. ^[1]

Joseph F. Smith

Do not let your children out to specialists in these things, but teach them by your own precept and example, by your own fireside. Be a specialist yourself in the truth. Let our meetings, schools and organizations, instead of being our only or leading teachers, be supplements to our teachings and training in the home. Not one child in a hundred would go astray, if the home environment, example and training, were in harmony with the truth in the gospel of Christ, as revealed and taught to the Latter-day Saints. ^[2]

Harold B. Lee

Sex education in school is not the answer. We are hearing of and reading constantly of the alarming increase of juvenile delinquency and major crimes among the youth, particularly sex crimes. An eminent educator, the Superintendent of Public Instruction in California, made this statement recently under the subject heading: “Don’t Saddle Schools with Sex Cleanup.” He said, “At first glance it would seem that today’s children need instruction in sexual matters as much as Custer needed more Indians. From morning until night, they are fed an almost unmixed diet of high-calorie, highly commercialized sex. . . . The so-called legitimate stage has achieved a condition of such sheer filth as to merit the adjective ´indescribable.’ We are the first generation since time began which has allowed its playwrights and its actors to wallow in vileness. . . .

“So a lot of people are urging schools to step in and clean this mess up by giving the youngsters a good stiff dose of sex education. . . . People are not discouraged from becoming safecrackers by learning how to manipulate tumblers in the dark. They avoid a life of crime because they are taught from infancy that crime is evil. The only way society has ever found to discourage misconduct is to label it clearly as either a crime or sin, or both, and then punish it accordingly.”

Then the superintendent of schools concludes: “Only when we adults, in our homes, our churches, our businesses, decide that we are going to set a decent example and demand decent behavior from the young, will the children start growing up to become the kind of people we want them to be, and should have been ourselves.” ^[3] How wise the words of this great educator! ^[4]

Be prepared to answer delicate questions. It is a successful mother who, as her little children begin to ask questions about intimate things, does not push them away, but sits down and answers honestly up to the limit of her child’s ability to understand, in order to satisfy the child’s curiosity. That kind of confidence between mother and daughter will exist until courtship and then to marriage, as the mother wisely guides her daughters through the difficult periods of growing up through girlhood and womanhood and wifehood and motherhood.

Most important in a home is to have a father who doesn’t shirk his responsibility to his sons when they seek and need answers to delicate questions and he too takes time to answer them. ^[5]

Parents, stay close to your children. You mothers, stay close to your daughters. When they’re little children, don’t let someone else tell them about the so-called facts of life. As soon as your little children begin to ask you questions, little tots about little intimate things, sit down and talk to them about the things to the limit of their intelligence. They will then say, “All right, Mother, that’s fine.” And then a little later when they get in their teenage, they’ll come again a second time, this time a little more sophisticated. Then they begin to date, and where will they come for counsel? If you’ve done your job, they’ll come to ask Mother about her counsel on this and that, and on the night of her marriage, she’ll seek counsel from her mother, not from the women on the street.

And you fathers, be companionable with your boys. Never turn your boy aside when he wants to have your counsel about the things that he wants a father to talk to him about. Therein is the safety in the home. There’s the safety of your young people. Don’t deny them that safety, you fathers and you mothers.

Fathers can help boys meet temptations when they come. One of the things we must do in teaching our young people is to condition them on how to meet a temptation that comes in an unguarded moment.

The one who has the chief responsibility is the father of the boy. This doesn’t mean that the father should wake up some morning and call his boy to his bedside and in fifteen minutes tell him all the facts of life. That isn’t what the boy needs. He needs a father to answer when he wants to ask questions of a delicate nature. He is hungering to know; he is curious about things.

If his father will be frank and honest, and tell him up to the limit of his intelligence as he grows up, that father will be the one to whom the son will return for counsel in the years that follow. That father will be an anchor to that boy’s soul, as the father takes from his book of experience lessons that he can give to his son to help condition him against the possibility of falling into that fatal trap in an unguarded moment.

Being chaste does not require detailed knowledge of reproduction. I had a visit from a woman who was writing a book. She wanted to know if I would read her manuscript, and I took a look at it. It was on sex. And I said I had no time to read this book, and she said, “Will you read this one chapter?” And it was one of the raciest, most blunt, and most plain descriptions that I could possibly read. As I laid it down, she asked, “Well, what do you think of it?” “Well,” I said, “if I spoke frankly I would tell you that you could never print that kind of a book with my consent.”

She looked a bit startled. She was not pleased. But a short while afterwards, one of our sisters took me aside and questioned me because I had said this to her friend. And I said, “Well, I have something that I heard President Clark say, and I should like to read it to you.

“. . . Unchastity is too common. It is in our schools from the grades up. It is in our business houses and industrial plants. It is too large a part of our ordinary and social lives. Parents are grasping at straws in an effort to hold their children. A cry is raised, the Church needs a book on sex, but what should such a book tell?

All that the schools have taught sex facts on all their teachings have torn away the modesty that once clothed sex. Their discussions tend to make it sometimes seem to make sex animals out of boys and girls. The teachings do little but arouse curiosity for experience.

A word on chastity can begin in one sentence, two words: Be chaste. That tells everything. You do not need to know all the details of the reproduction processes in order to keep clean. Be chaste because God commanded it. That is all there is to it. ^{[6] [7]}

The adverse consequences of immorality have a ripple effect. I read something recently which seemed to strike right to the heart of the ugly temptations of immorality among us today: “The principal reason for sex deification is loss of belief in God. Once men lose God, they lose the purpose of life; and when the purpose of living is forgotten, the universe becomes meaningless. Man then tries to forget his emptiness in the intensity of momentary experience.

“Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend that nothing else exists.” ^[8]

The trend of sex education in schools today is towards special schools for unwed mothers and birth control to assist unwed mothers on relief, yet not one word of the thundered injunctions of the Almighty—”Thou shalt not.”

When we break commandments, we hurt ourselves and others too. The error usually results in sadness, depression, hostility, or withdrawal, if we do not repent. We, in effect, diminish our self-esteem; we downgrade our roles as sons and daughters of God; we may even try to run away from the ultimate reality of who we really are!

When we sin we become less effective members of the human family. In a way, we are the moral equivalent of a typhoid carrier, because we may damage others; we may even strike back at the human family in a twisted way for our own failures, and thus human suffering is multiplied. The unchastity of parents can send forth a chain reaction that can span the generations, even though the resentment and rebellion of disappointed children may take a different form. The absence of love at home causes ripples of reaction that roll across all of us; mankind pays an awful price for this kind of failure. What could be more relevant to the needs of the human family than for us to be chaste, to develop love at home—in fact, to keep every commandment? Youth who seek after the rapture of the moment will lose the peace of years. ^[9]

While we are in the world, we must not be of the world. Any attempts being made by the schools or places of entertainment to flaunt sexual perversions, which can do nothing but excite to experimentation, must find among the priesthood in this church a vigorous and unrelenting [opposition] through every lawful means that can be employed. ^[10]

Ezra Taft Benson

Another threat, and he said it is the most serious of the three, would be sexual impurity. Today we have both of these threats combined in the growing and increasingly amoral program of sex education in the schools. At the last general Relief Society conference of the Church, Elder Harold B. Lee quoted President J. Reuben Clark, Jr., in regard to this matter. Let us listen and learn from the following wise words of this seer, President Clark:

“Many influences (more than ever before in my lifetime) are seeking to break down chastity with its divinely declared sanctity. . . . In schoolrooms the children are taught what is popularly called ´the facts of life.’ Instead of bringing about the alleged purpose of the teaching, that is, strengthening of the morals of youth, this teaching seems to have had directly the opposite effect. The teaching seems merely to have whetted curiosity and augmented appetite. ^[11]

“. . . A mind engrossed in sex is not good for much else. . . . Already the schools have taught sex facts ad nauseam. All their teachings have but torn away the modesty that once clothed sex; their discussions tend to make, and sometimes seem to make, sex animals of our boys and girls. The teachings do little but arouse curiosity for experience. . . . A work on chastity can be given in one sentence, two words: Be chaste! That tells everything. You do not need to know all the details of the reproductive process in order to keep clean. . . .” ^[12]

Our Church News editorials have warned us about sex education in the schools. As the April 1, 1967, editorial stated: “Sex education belongs in the home. . . . Movements to place sex education in nearly all grades of public schools can end only in the same result which came to Sweden.”

In answer to inquiries that have been received by the First Presidency about sex education in the schools, they have made the following statement: “We believe that serious hazards are involved in entrusting to the schools the teaching of this vital and important subject to our children. This responsibility cannot wisely be left to society, nor the schools: nor can the responsibility be shifted to the Church. It is the responsibility of parents to see that they fully perform their duty in this respect.

When you make a close study of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (known as SIECUS), which is the major organization pushing sex education in the schools, and read their literature and learn of their amoral leadership, you can better appreciate why the Church is opposed to sex education in the schools, whether it is called family living program or by any other name. I commend the parents who have worked to keep it out of their schools and those who have pushed it out or are attempting to do so. They must love their children. ^[13]

One of the great needs is more parental instruction in life’s problems. I know there is a tendency for parents to shrink from this responsibility, the instructing of their own children in the problems of sex, the relationship with other young people, the problem of dating, and all of the many temptations that confront a growing boy and girl. These instructions should not be left to the school or to a class in sociology. The safest place, the best place, to give this vital counsel, these sacred instructions, in matters of moral purity should be in the home on a basis of confidence between parent and child. As parents, we should instruct our children. The sacred books of the ancient Persians say: “If you would be holy, instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed unto you.” ^[14]

Some fathers leave solely to the mother or to the school the responsibility of shaping a child’s ideas and standards. Too often television and movie screens shape our children’s values. We should not assume that public schools always reinforce teachings given in the home concerning ethical and moral conduct. We have seen introduced into many school systems false ideas about the theory of man’s development from lower forms of life, teachings that there are no absolute values, attempts to repudiate beliefs regarded as supernatural, permissive attitudes toward sexual freedom that give sanction to immoral behavior and “alternative lifestyles,” such as lesbianism, homosexuality, and other perverse practices.

Such teachings not only tend to undermine the faith and morals of our young people, they also deny the existence of God, who gave absolute laws, and the divinity of Jesus Christ. Surely we can see the moral contradiction of some who argue for the preservation of endangered species but who also sanction the abortion of unborn humans. The Lord expects great things from the fathers of Israel. Fathers must take time to find out what their children are being taught and then take steps to correct false information and teaching. ^[15]

You, as our great youth, are surrounded and bombarded from all sides by the atrocious, destructive evils of the devil, which are revealed in modern music, in modern art, in sex perversion, in so-called sex education in the schools, in destructive sensitivity training-a powerful form of Pavlovian brainwashing. These evils are prominent in the promotion of drugs (LSD, marijuana, and a host of others), in leading magazines and underground publications for youth, in television, in movies and radio programs, in pornographic literature, in morally destructive paperback books available to all on newsstands. ^[16]

Recently some parents paid for space in a newspaper to run an open letter to the school principal of their son. The letter stated in part:

You are hereby notified that our son, (———), is not allowed by his undersigned parents to participate in, or be subject to, instruction in any training or education in sex, human biological development, attitude development, self-understanding, personal and family life, or group therapy, or sensitivity training, or self-criticism, or any combination or degree thereof, without the consent of the undersigned by express written permission. . . . We intend to retain and exercise our parental rights to guide our child in the areas of morality and sexual behavior without any interference or contradiction imposed by school personnel. Our son] has been taught to recognize the format of sensitivity training, group therapy, self-criticism, etc., as it is being broadly applied, lowering the standards of morality and replacing American individual responsibility with dependency on, and conformity to, the “herd consensus” concept of collectivism. He has been instructed to promptly remove himself from any class in which he is exposed to the aforementioned indoctrination and to report to us any such disregard of this letter.

The Lord knew that in the last days Satan would try to destroy the family unit. He knew that by court edict, pornography would be allowed to prosper. ^[17]

[We should] reassert the primary right and responsibility of parents for the total education of their children, including social values, religious convictions, and political concepts. Schools should be reminded that their primary field of competence is academic, not social adjustment, or world citizenship, or sex education. Parents should stand firm on this and not be intimidated by ‘professional educators.’ After all, it’s their children and their money. ^[18]

It was also in 1969 that Elder Benson took on one of the hottest issues in the country: sex education in the schools. He was alarmed that some Americans and Latter-day Saints wanted to teach at school a subject that should be taught sensitively and plainly in the home. As early as 1953 he had foreseen this problem, when he declared: ‘I know there is a tendency for parents to shrink from this responsibility, the instructing of their own children in the problems of sex, the relationship with other young people, the problem of dating, and all of the many temptations that confront a growing boy and girl. These instructions should not be left to the school or to a class in sociology. The safest place, the best place, to give this vital counsel . . . in matters of moral purity should be in the home on a basis of confidence between parent and child. . . . From early 1969 on, he spoke firmly against the issue, and in private he encouraged the Church to offer specific direction. At stake conferences in Oregon and Utah that year, he found stakes divided on the issue, and at the request of local stake presidencies he devoted time to the subject from the pulpit, exposing sex education as an assault that could destroy the sexual morals and sensitivities of an entire generation of American youth. ^[19]

Elder Benson left nothing to chance with his own grandchildren and furnished them with materials on this and other issues that he thought might be helpful. His grandchildren received letters and literature frequently. He sent information on everything from teachings of the prophets to foreign affairs. The education of his grandchildren outside of school was broadened due to their grandfather’s influence. When granddaughter Flora Parker moved to Finland with her parents ^[20], the volumes of information her grandfather sent her did more to help with her home school education than perhaps anything else. Ezra’s efforts also exposed a new generation of Bensons to constitutional thought.

In an address at the nondenominational “Strong Families/Strong America” program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 24, 1978, President Benson unabashedly called for prayer in the home and for parental instruction on such crucial matters as sex education. Holding up a copy of the Church’s current home evening manual, he admonished parents to forsake so much pleasure-seeking and to spend more time with their children. ‘The home is the rock foundation, the cornerstone of civilization,’ he said. ’The church, the school, and even the nation stand helpless before a weak and degraded home. No nation will rise above its homes. ^[21]

Gordon B. Hinckley

[T]he observance of one clearly understandable and divinely given rule would do more than all else to check this [AIDS] epidemic. That is chastity before marriage and total fidelity after marriage. Prophets of God have repeatedly taught through the ages that practices of homosexual relations, fornication, and adultery are grievous sins. Sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage are forbidden by the Lord. We reaffirm those teachings. ^[22]

There is a philosophy among large numbers of people that sex education in our schools is the answer to the terrible problems of teenage pregnancies, abortions, and other grievous matters. . . I am inclined to agree with one who was quoted in USA TODAY: “More sex education in public schools will not reverse the damaging legacy of the sexual revolution unless the clear message is premarital chastity and marital monogamy.”

This writer continues: “There are many defects in sex education courses. The philosophy behind them is to ridicule chastity, scoff at fidelity, and glamorize sexual adventurism. They teach there is no such thing as right and wrong. Thirty years of advocating sexual liberation has brought raging venereal diseases and rampant teenage pregnancy. Most sex education in the public schools morally disarms the students rather than giving them moral sensitivity to help them make the proper sexual choices. Sex education fights the modesty and morality endemic to human life.” ^[23]

. . . The Lord has made it clear, and the experience of centuries has confirmed it, that happiness lies not in immorality, but rather in abstinence. Gordon B. Hinckley, General Conference, April 1987The voice of the Church to which you belong is a voice pleading for virtue. It is a voice pleading for strength to abstain from that which is evil. It is a voice declaring that sexual transgression is sin. It is contrary to the will of the Lord. It is contrary to the teachings of the Church. It is contrary to the happiness and well-being of those who indulge in it.

You should recognize, you must recognize, that both experience and divine wisdom dictate virtue and moral cleanliness as the way that leads to strength of character, peace in the heart, and happiness in life. . . .For your own sakes, for your happiness now and in all the years to come, and for the happiness of the generations who come after you, avoid sexual transgression as you would a plague. Prove your strength, show your independence, by saying no when enticement from peers comes your way. Your own strength will add strength to those who are weak. Your own example will give determination to others. ^[24]

The endless sex and violence on network TV, the trash of so many motion pictures, the magnified sensuality found in much of modern literature, the emphasis on sex education, a widespread breakdown of law and order—all are manifestations of this decay. ^{[25] [26]}

Opposing Statements

Scripture

Supporting Statements

Boyd K. Packer

The same point may be made with reference to so-called sex education. There are many things that are factual, even elevating, about this subject. There are other aspects of this subject that are so perverted and ugly that it does little good to talk of them at all. Some things cannot be safely taught to little children or to those who are not eligible by virtue of age or maturity or authorizing ordinance to understand them.

Teaching prematurely or at the wrong time some things that are true can invite sorrow and heartbreak instead of the joy intended to accompany learning. . . . It matters very much not only what we are told but when we are told it. Be careful that you build faith rather than destroy it. ^[27]

J. Reuben Clark Jr.

Unchastity is too common. It is in our schools from the grades up. It is in our business houses and industrial plants. It is too large a part of our ordinary and social lives. Parents are grasping at straws in an effort to hold their children. A cry is raised, the Church needs a book on sex, but what should such a book tell?

All that the schools have taught sex facts on all their teachings have torn away the modesty that once clothed sex. Their discussions tend to make it sometimes seem to make sex animals out of boys and girls. The teachings do little but arouse curiosity for experience.

A word on chastity can begin in one sentence, two words: Be chaste. That tells everything. You do not need to know all the details of the reproduction processes in order to keep clean. Be chaste because God commanded it. That is all there is to it. ^[28]

Conference Report

Many influences (more than ever before in my lifetime) are seeking to break down chastity with its divinely declared sanctity. . . .In schoolrooms the children are taught what is popularly called “the facts of life.” Instead of bringing about the alleged purpose of the teaching, that is, strengthening of the morals of youth, this teaching seems to have had directly the opposite effect. The teaching seems merely to have whetted curiosity and augmented appetite. . . . ^[29]. . . A mind engrossed in sex is not good for much else. . . .Already the schools have taught sex facts ad nauseam. All their teachings have but torn away the modesty that once clothed sex; their discussions tend to make, and sometimes seem to make, sex animals of our boys and girls. The teachings do little but arouse curiosity for experience. . . .A work on chastity can be given in one sentence, two words: Be chaste! That tells everything. You do not need to know all the details of the reproductive processes in order to keep clean. . . . ^[30]

Mark E. Petersen

I would like to say, with all the emphasis at my command, that the proper teaching of sex requires also the teaching of complete chastity, whether that instruction is given in the home, the school, or the church. To do otherwise is nothing less than suicidal. To ignore chastity in such instruction can transform it into a course in youthful sex experimentation. God made sex, but not for entertainment. It was provided for a divinely appointed act of creation in which we, to this extent, become co-creators with him.

If we fail to teach this, we defeat the whole purpose of sex education.When schools are prevented from teaching anything of a spiritual nature, they are thereby disqualified from teaching sex at all, for in its very nature, sex is spiritual and inseparably connected with the creative work of God. We are not animals, to dwell only in a physical world. We are the offspring of God, learning in this life to become like him. He decreed that human beings never shall indulge in sex outside of holy matrimony, which he himself instituted. This is his definition of chastity. This is what he requires of every man and every woman.

Sex education belongs in the home, where parents can teach chastity in a spiritual environment as they reveal the facts of life to their children. There, in all plainness, the youngsters can be taught that procreation is part of the creative work of God and that, therefore, the act of replenishing the earth must be kept on the high plane of personal purity that God provides, free from all forms of perversion. ^[31]

Hartman Rector, Jr.

May we . . . not be taken in by all the misinformation which is abroad in the land today about birth control, abortion and sex education, and other Satan-inspired philosophies; that we may look to the Lord and follow his living prophets and oracles today. ^[32]

Church News Editorial

Sex education belongs in the home. . . . Movements to place sex education in nearly all grades of public schools can end only in the same result which came to Sweden. ^[33]

Alvin R. Dyer

These deceptive and shadowed objectives of well-propagandized programs are moving at a very rapid clip. The first to which I refer is sex education or family life education, which is placing emphasis on raw sex in the school classroom, creating widespread contention, causing deep concern among parents and leaders.

The programmers of this type of sex education, aware of resistance, are fortified with worked-out methods to deal with parental and community opposition. This matter needs the serious concern of an aroused public to deny the use of such materials and more firmly establish sound moral teachings in the fields of physiology and hygiene, as now provided by public school law.

The National Education Association and American Medical Association’s endorsement of a maturation educational program seems to have stepped up the activity of such organizations as the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (known as SIECUS) and the School Health Education Studies (known as SHES), with others, particularly those that are integrated in family life education courses.

With ominous precision, reputable publishing houses are competing in this untapped market with expertly prepared materials, films, and teaching aids of all sorts. Herein, because of its sensational marketable value, is a formidable danger.

False images in the life of the very young will result from their idea to teach facts of reproduction before youth are emotionally involved. The misguided fostering of sex education in the classroom on the basis that it will lessen sex ignorance and reduce illegitimate pregnancy, venereal disease, and related problems has no basis for sound conclusions. Actual experience has proven the results to be just the opposite.

The “new morality” requires that young people solve their own sex problems without the help of teachers or parents. What is moral and what is not moral, or whether morality is involved at all, is to be decided by the student. The most surprising and devastating of all is the effort that is being made to isolate sex education as being completely devoid of moral responsibility, fear, inhibitions, and emotional restraints.

Whether used by those who are skilled or unskilled, any teachings that describe and illustrate human reproductive organs and their functions, and any teachings that are directly counter to standards of sexual morality, do not harmonize with the gospel, and the Church is therefore opposed to such. They are void of respect and reverence for the opposite sex, life, birth, and parenthood.

We must not be insensible to evil influences that are being thrust upon us by the perverted principles of sex education, sensitivity training, youth for alcohol, and any flexibilities in the sacredness of marriage, which are challenging moral decency and righteousness. We must unite our efforts, by organized parental councils with fathers taking part, through school boards, textbook committees, and proper legislation, to vigorously oppose such programming. ^[34]

Encylopedia of Mormonism, vol. 3

The Church prohibits sexual involvement except between a man and woman who are lawfully married to each other. Latter-day Saints are expected to abstain from sexual intercourse prior to marriage and to honor the marriage covenant by confining sexual relations to the spouse only.

Sexual morality also requires abstention from activities that arouse desires not expressible until marriage. Sexual abstinence prior to marriage is considered not only right and possible but also beneficial. Abstinence is not viewed as repression, nor are there any particular negative consequences to so living.

Parents have the obligation to teach their children both the goodness-the sacredness-of the power to create life (see procreation) and the principles of maturation and sexual development. Church leaders encourage parents to discuss sexuality openly with their children, answering their questions straightforwardly and contrasting the Lord’s plan for his children-which includes their eventual ability to produce children themselves-with the ways this power to create life can be profaned or abused. Children are to be prepared while young and, according to appropriate stages of development, are to be taught regarding human reproduction and the emotional and spiritual meanings of the procreative power and sexual desires that will grow within them…. Parents are expected to teach correct principles and to be examples of what they teach, treating each other with compassion and charity and living in a relationship of absolute fidelity.

Fundamental to all parental instruction is a parent-child relationship of love and trust. Youth are vulnerable to sexual enticements both because of the strength of their developing desires and because they are still growing in understanding and responsibility. Full comprehension of the consequences-to themselves and to succeeding generations-of the failure to abstain sexually may not come simultaneously with their sexual interests. Trust and respect for parents can help insulate adolescents from temptation while their capacity to exercise full rights and responsibilities matures.

Parents’ responsibility to educate children sensitively and directly should not be delegated to the public schools or other agencies outside the home. When public sex-education programs are offered, LDS parents are counseled to assure that such programs adequately acknowledge the sanctity of marriage and promote family-oriented values and standards. . . .

Practically speaking, the benefits of living a chaste life prior to marriage and of observing a relationship of fidelity after marriage apply to every dimension of marriage and family relationships. By remaining chaste before marriage and totally faithful to one’s spouse in a heterosexual marriage, one can avoid some physically debilitating diseases, extramarital pregnancies, and venereal infections passed on to offspring. The sense of trust, loyalty, love, and commitment essential to the ideal of oneness in marriage and family life is not damaged or strained. Furthermore, one’s relationship to and confidence in God are strengthened. By governing the power to create life, one sets the stage for the exercise of these desires, not whimsically, but with a reverence for the sacredness of the divine powers of creation. ^[35]

Wil and Ariel Durant

A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by customs, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group. ^[36]

Geoffrey Botkin

How ‘The Pill’ Led to Societal Infantilism

This year, as the birth-control pill turns 50, America is discovering a lethal side effect. It’s called moral stupefaction. The pill has made an entire generation of adult Americans progressively more stupidly infantile. One half-century of a fatal, anti-baby culture is killing us. There is a culture-wide inability to think intelligently about what we have done to ourselves.

When the saga of oral contraception began in 1960, my surviving peers and I were in kindergarten. I say “surviving” because the pill emerged the year my classmates were conceived. This was the year some of my other peers were not conceived. The fanatical eugenics crusader Margaret Sanger had been demanding a “miracle pill” since 1923. In 1953 she persuaded a rich, frustrated, anti-child feminist to bankroll hormone experiments on women. Eight-hundred ninety-seven test subjects, who did not want to have babies, simply popped the new experimental drug. Eureka. No babies.

My surviving peers grew up being taught this was success in the name of science, in the name of the future and in the name of the state. The FDA approved commercial sales in 1960, and the Sanger generation, seated in the kindergartens of a government school system, would now give life to a culture of death.

I have since wondered which of my potential classmates missed their birth days. And I wonder how many of my kindergarten friends lost little brothers and sisters when the pill went on the market that first year of school – the year my school chums were celebrating each others’ 6th birthdays. We were the culminating fruit of the eugenics movement. We were at ground zero of the final chapter in the eugenics experiment. We were told the new culture was a culture of freedom, self-fulfillment, fun and life. The Sanger generation was lied to.

Soon my hot-blooded classmates were matriculated into junior high. This was another historic year for the Sanger generation. They came of age in a promiscuous culture they were taught to own, celebrate and perpetuate. This new culture embraced them when they were infants and succeeded in making them more infantile with each passing year. Puberty only accelerated this process. They were now old enough to taste social freedom themselves, and they all knew exactly what this culture of freedom was. It was an endorsement by science and government to be immature and irresponsible. They knew exactly where babies came from. And they knew this drugs-and-personal-self-indulgence culture was anti-baby. Eureka. Perpetual fun, no consequences, and no babies.

For the Sanger generation, mature family life with children was no longer a part of growing up. Approved drugs could be obtained – free – by the healthy adolescent for a new cultural purpose: to bypass the responsibilities of family. These drugs cured no medical ailment, but promoted a long-term social purpose endorsed by the government. The FDA, the Post Office, the courts and the school curriculum all approved of the new “pill” culture. Take a pill and engineer the population of an entire nation. Take a pill and be yourself. Take a pill and gratify your desires immediately. Take a pill and protect yourself from the consequences of infantile stupidity.

Now, sex and recreation were co-joined with the concept of permanent adolescence. An entire generation was listening to Mick Jagger croon, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and Jim Morrison scream, “Light My Fire!” That year Hugh Hefner’s theology was a big part of this new culture. It circulated wildly in the locker room, teaching my peers the joys of predatory, zero-consequence freedom. The pill, after all, had rescued the fortunes of Playboy magazine, which in turn created a bigger market for the pill, along with massive magazine revenues Hefner spent on court cases making birth control legal in all 50 states. Federal bureaucrats were doing their part in the revolution, not just giving pills to poor minorities (per Lyndon Johnson), but to school girls (per Margaret Sanger). Margaret Sanger died that year, 1966, in the knowledge that 12 million women were ingesting and making the most of her “magic pill.” Her eulogizers remembered these famous phrases:

[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children.

[Women must have the right] to live … to love … to be lazy … to be an unmarried mother … to create … to destroy.

The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order.

The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. ^[37]

The next year, pill revenue exploded to $150 million. Hollywood’s “Prudence and the Pill” made artificial birth control a point of comedy, a cool icon of pop culture. No one was ashamed of Margaret Sanger any more. And no one saw what was coming.

My headstrong peers graduated to yet greater social freedoms, with fewer and fewer responsibilities. The first year of dorm life in college was an opportunity for unlimited indulgence and uninhibited childishness. When the pill didn’t work, my peers threw tantrums to demand a backup, another “fix” for the wages of indulgence. It came that year, right on time, with Roe v. Wade. I remember campus discussions about legalized abortion.

“It’s murder, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s murder. Everybody knows it’s murder. But it’s legal. And it’s just a baby. The Supreme Court said it’s totally OK to abort. So it’s totally OK.”

Eureka. Perpetual intemperance, no babies and no arrest warrant for murder. Today the Sanger generation is old enough to know better, but is now completely blind to consequences. As they rise to position of responsibility in the Congress, courts, media and business, the ways of facing problems are the same. Childish tantrums. Denial. A paralysis of indecision. A refusal to suffer, or even to do the hard work of thinking. “Just give me a quick, magic solution with no future consequences.”

But consequences of the death culture are piling up. The children they never had are not there to keep the economy strong. The government’s solution? No babies. According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the government must tax more workers to pay for more state-funded contraception so there are fewer children to take care of, thus relieving the nanny state of the high costs of raising children for infantile parents.

But the absence of babies leads to, well, something the Sanger generation does not want to think about: future consequences. Infants think only about the immediate present. Infantile men have the same problem.

Could this be true partly because of the pill and what the pill does to men physiologically? An estimated 110 million women currently ingest the pill. Large amounts of unprocessed estrogen and progesterone pass through their bodies, into the sewage treatment systems and back into the water supply ^[38]. On NBC News, the head of Denver’s largest sewage plant reported that most of the nation’s plants simply can’t remove all the estrogen in the water. “We’re concerned about the effect on aquatic life, but we’re also concerned about our ability to actually treat for these estrogens and estrogen mimickers,” said the official.

Male fish down river from these plants are becoming physiologically female. When male humans drink the water or eat the fish, what happens to them? Why is sperm count falling in American men? Why is breast-reduction surgery on the rise in men? Why do men show such passivity? Such an immature refusal to face reality? Why do they insist that overpopulation is still the No. 1 environmental problem when there are so few babies?

Fifty-nine modern nations are plagued by the high-tech benefits of birth-control pills. Each of them have waged a cultural war against babies. Each of them suffer below-replacement birthrates. Each of them face potential extinction. But concerns such as national suffering, dangerous international geopolitics and the disappearance of entire nations are matters that would require mature thinking – something that was successfully bred-out of the American people when they accepted the pill as, in the words of Hugh Hefner, the greatest invention of the 20th century. ^[39]

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1. ↑ First Presidency, as quoted in “Policies and Procedures,” New Era, Nov 1971, p. 47
2. ↑ Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine, p. 301; Improvement Era, Vol. 7, Dec., 1904, p. 135
3. ↑ Dr. Max Rafferty, The Salt Lake Tribune, 1964. Copyright 1965, Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
4. ↑ Harold B. Lee, Conference Report, April 1965, p.14
5. ↑ Harold B. Lee, Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 78
6. ↑ J. Reuben Clark Jr., in Conference Report, October 1949, p. 194.
7. ↑ Harold B. Lee, Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 227-229
8. ↑ Fulton Sheen.
9. ↑ Harold B. Lee, Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 226-227
10. ↑ Harold B. Lee, Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 230
11. ↑ Relief Society Magazine, December 1952, p. 793.
12. ↑ Era, December 1949, p. 803. See also, CR, October 1949, p. 194.
13. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, Conference Report, April 1969, p.11-15; God, Family, Country, p. 259
14. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p. 295; So Shall Ye Reap, pp. 120-21
15. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p. 296; Come unto Christ, p. 59
16. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988], 392; Scandinavia and Finland Area Conference, 16-18 August 1974
17. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, God, Family, Country: Our Three Great Loyalties, p. 228
18. ↑ Ezra Taft Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This, p. 231
19. ↑ Sherri Dew, Ezra Taft Benson: A Biography, p. 403–404
20. ↑ who had been called to preside over the mission there
21. ↑ Sherri Dew, Ezra Taft Benson: A Biography, p. 454
22. ↑ Gordon B. Hinckley, April 1987 General Conference
23. ↑ Tottie Ellis, Teaching about Sex Endangers Children, 16 Mar. 1987
24. ↑ Gordon B. Hinckley, April 1987 General Conference
25. ↑ “Bring Up a Child in the Way He Should Go,” Ensign, November 1993, p. 59.
26. ↑ Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1997], p. 382
27. ↑ Boyd K. Packer, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, p. 107
28. ↑ J. Reuben Clark Jr., in Conference Report, October 1949, p. 194
29. ↑ Relief Society Magazine, December 1952, p. 793.
30. ↑ Conference Report, October 1949, p. 194.
31. ↑ Mark E. Petersen, CR, April 1969, p.63-64
32. ↑ Hartman Rector, Jr., General Conference April 1973
33. ↑ LDS Church News editorial, April 1, 1967
34. ↑ Alvin R. Dyer, Conference Report, April 1969, p.54-55, 57
35. ↑ Terrance D. Olson, “Sexuality,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Vol.3
36. ↑ Wil and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968, pp. 35–36
37. ↑ “The Woman Rebel,” Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922
38. ↑ Barbara Biggs, NBC News, Nov. 9, 2004
39. ↑ Geoffrey Botkin, How ‘The Pill’ Led to Societal Infantilism, www.westernconservatory.com