Religions > Atheism > Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"words of truth" |
| Date: |
08 Jan 2006 05:37:00 PM |
| Object: |
Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques |
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=3D18-03-057-r
The Young & the Hot-Wired
Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques
by Dawn Eden
Readers are warned that this report includes quite graphic language
from Planned Parenthood's website.
In January of this year, when a 16-year-old boy had been charged with a
felony for killing his girlfriend's unborn child by striking her
stomach with a baseball bat, Planned Parenthood acknowledged that a
tragedy had occurred. But the organization's definition of tragedy
was far different from that of prosecutors.
For Planned Parenthood, the tragedy was not that the unborn child was
killed. It was that the abortion was done outside a doctor's office,
with all the legal and medical protections that such an environment
provides. According to The Detroit News,
Lori Lamerand, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Mid-Michigan
Alliance, said pregnant teens have safer options available than
terminating a pregnancy without a doctor. "It's always tragic when
people resort to such drastic measures, when there are appropriate,
safe medical measures available," Lamerand said.
That is how Planned Parenthood deals with uncomfortable moral issues,
especially as they relate to teenagers and abortion: paradigm shifts.
It aims to redirect people's natural sense of right and wrong, so
that they will have a sense of moral justification as they condemn what
is good and uphold what is evil. How better to shift the moral paradigm
of a generation than by instilling a new set of values in its young?
An article in the Madera (California) Tribune on that city's Planned
Parenthood clinic included, amid the usual description of the site's
offerings, an aside from the facility's manager: "Our community
outreach program includes providing books for the children of our
clients to encourage their love of reading."
Since its inception, Planned Parenthood has been keenly interested in
providing reading material to children-and doing so in a
surreptitious fashion that belies the organization's true intent. In
1916, its founder, Margaret Sanger, published the sex-ed pamphlet What
Every Mother Should Know, or, How Six Little Children Were Taught the
Truth, explaining her method in its introduction: "The idea is that
the child be taught the process of reproduction and absorb such
knowledge without realizing he has received any 'sex'
instruction."
Over the years, Planned Parenthood has melded Sanger's teachings with
those of Dr. Alfred Kinsey and the Sex Information and Education
Council of the United States (SIECUS, which received its first major
grant money from Playboy magazine). The result, which has been revised
many times over, is one of the organization's most widely distributed
publications, available on its website: Human Sexuality-What Children
Need to Know and When They Need to Know It.
Sex education used to be given entirely by children's parents, free
from the influence of government or other outside organizations. It was
based upon personal responsibility and self-control. Even when parents
erred by instilling undue shame, the lesson-that sex should be
reserved for marriage-gave children moral strength to resist allowing
themselves to use others or be used as a means to an end.
The Kinsey/SIECUS/Planned Parenthood paradigm, as expressed in Human
Sexuality, is likewise all about personal responsibility and
self-control. But the responsibility has shifted to the responsibility
to make one's own "choices"-and self-control is reduced to
having the presence of mind to use a condom.
Controlling Impulses
Instead of treating sexuality as but one aspect of a person's
identity, Planned Parenthood assumes that sexual impulses control us,
rather than the other way around. As Human Sexuality puts it:
Our sexuality includes
=B7 our body and how our body works
=B7 our biological sex
=B7 our gender-our biological, social, and legal status as girls and
boys, women and men
=B7 our gender identity-our feelings about our gender
=B7 our sexual orientation-straight, gay, or bisexual
=B7 our values about life, love, and the people in our lives
And sexuality influences how we feel about all of these things and how
we experience the world.
This is Planned Parenthood's philosophy in a nutshell. Through it,
sexuality is no longer subordinate to individuals' "values about
life, love, and the people in our lives," but usurps them to become
the driving force.
The emphasis on the controlling power of sexual drives and impulses
comes through most strongly in Human Sexuality's repeated emphasis
upon teaching children masturbation. By age five, it states,
"children need to know that touching their sex organs for pleasure is
normal," and they "need to be able to seek privacy when they want
to touch their sex organs for pleasure." Children ages eight to
twelve "need to know that masturbation is very common and that it is
normal to masturbate-but only in private." And again, in case
parents didn't get it the first two times, the brochure repeats,
"they need to be able to feel that it is normal to masturbate."
The use of masturbation as a means of educating children about
sexuality from "under age five" onward, accomplishes five things
for Planned Parenthood:
=B7 It enables children to detach sexual expression from love or any
kind of bonding with another human being.
=B7 It makes children precociously interested in using their bodies for
sexual gratification, so that they will move on to intercourse more
quickly when given the opportunity. (Planned Parenthood's Teenwire
website encourages children to use masturbation as a "dress
rehearsal.")
=B7 It gives children the illusion of being in control of their sex
life, while encouraging them to simply act on their passions whenever
the urge strikes them.
=B7 It is the ultimate "safe sex," offering all the physical
benefits of intercourse without the risk of pregnancy or sexually
transmitted disease. (Teenwire, following SIECUS's lead, heavily
pushes mutual masturbation and other forms of "outercourse" upon
its young readers.)
=B7 Perhaps most insidiously, it enables Planned Parenthood to teach
masturbation as falling under the umbrella of "abstinence," which
it does via the "comprehensive sexual education" and "abstinence
plus" programs that it is currently presenting to school districts
nationwide with the help of SIECUS.
Teenwired
Last January, in the wake of a report by its longtime ally, Rep. Henry
Waxman (D-Cal.), deriding abstinence-only
educational programs, Planned Parenthood announced in a press release,
"It's time to rise up and tell the federal government to stop
funding abstinence-only programs and start investing in medically
accurate, comprehensive, and responsible sex education."
For an understanding of what Planned Parenthood means by such
education, one need look no further than Teenwire, which the
organization claims is the leading site for teenagers seeking answers
about sex. No mere archive of Q's and A's, Teenwire is a slickly
produced "edutainment" site, bursting with interactive games,
quizzes, and animations. It's the multi-media realization of all the
goals of Human Sexuality and then some, including:
=B7 An animation to educate children about sexually transmitted
diseases-which depicts a naked couple copulating with a cow.
=B7 Another animation about sexual preferences, depicting a man taking
a pig for his sexual partner-while a narrator explains that such
behavior is "normal."
=B7 The suggestion, in an article called "All About the *****," that
heterosexual couples can "use anal sex as a way to preserve the
woman's virginity."
=B7 A sex-shop owner's observations about pornography
consumers-and, on the very same page, a link to a site where underage
readers may purchase items from the owner's shop.
=B7 Instructions on how to troll for homosexual sex partners online.
(The site's 93 articles for "Queer or Questioning" teens include
such items as "The ABCD of LGBT Dating"-LGBT stands for
"lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered"-and "How My Best
Friend Survived His Homophobic Family," plus answers to questions
such as "How do lesbian couples have sex?")
=B7 The repeated and insistent promotion of masturbation as a means of
making one less likely to desire intercourse. (One essay proclaims:
"Masturbation is a freebie.")
=B7 An advice column that tells a 15-year-old girl that it's
perfectly okay to lose her virginity: "The only person who can tell
if you're ready to have sex is YOU!"
All this would be disturbing enough if the site were intended only for
teenagers. However, a check of Teenwire's registration page-which
enables users to "Ask the Experts" and to answer one another's
questions in the "Hothouse"-reveals that its target demographic
runs all the way down to the SpongeBob SquarePants set. To register on
Teenwire, one has to give a birth year between 1960 and 1998. So
registered users may be as old as 44-or as young as six.
This is despite the fact that the site's note to "Parents and
Professionals" specifically requests that adults not register on the
site. In the manner that has been the hallmark of Planned
Parenthood's sex education since the days of Margaret Sanger's
pamphlets, Teenwire advises its readers of the rules-and then gives
them the means to break them.
Saving Condoms
Planned Parenthood's stated goal with Teenwire is to educate teens to
make "responsible choices." But while the site's materials
occasionally mention abstinence as one of many choices, it never dares
to suggest, even gently, that there are real benefits to waiting-
benefits that are emotional as well as physical. By stressing
"choice"-the organization's mantra-it not only encourages
teens to accept abortion (and thus to have abortions), but also to
change their thinking about every other sexual matter, including
contraception, homosexuality, and flexible gender identities.
This approach, which Planned Parenthood has been developing on Teenwire
for the past six years, is the basis for the curriculum that Planned
Parenthood is trying to instill in the public schools by having its
representatives speak to classes. Thanks to the enormous amount of
federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars that the organization
receives for its operations (over a quarter-billion in fiscal 2004), it
has great financial leeway to use money from donors to achieve its
goals.
To explore Teenwire is to enter a labyrinth of dizzying choices, with
seemingly endless options, none of which leads to truth. The only
absolute certainties in Planned Parenthood's relativist universe are
the saving power of condoms-which the site stresses will enable one
to attain all of one's sexual goals safely-and the overriding
importance of pleasure, which must be pursued at all costs.
The brazen way in which Teenwire creates a morality-free zone for its
young visitors is apparent in essays like "Porn vs. Reality."
Christy Brownlee writes, "Now, if you're a law-abiding teenager, we
can safely say you've never even taken a peek at pornographic
material-it's illegal in the U.S. for anyone under the age of 18.
However, not everyone follows the rules, and you may run across some
porn before you turn 18. There are a few things you should know about
the images you might see. Tune in, and we'll tell you the facts!"
And do they ever. The whole article is written for teenagers who
don't "follow the rules." Because some of them may already have
been exposed to pornography, all the others get to hear about it-from
a prurient perspective that implies "everybody's doing it."
Replace "pornography" with "sex" and that's Planned
Parenthood's "comprehensive sex education" in a nutshell.
Expert Advice
The ostensible point of "Porn vs. Reality" is to boost young
people's self-esteem by telling them that they don't have to look
like porn stars in order to be sexually attractive: "For the most
part, the models or actors used in porn fulfill certain physical
stereotypes. . . . The stereotypes are designed to let the viewer
fantasize about the activity, not about the people doing it. So most
people who have real sex don't look anything like people who have sex
in porn, especially the women."
To boost this hypothesis, Teenwire turns to a real-life expert: the
owner of the sex-shop chain Toys in Babeland, who helpfully explains
that all kinds of people like to watch pornography: "People who stop
by her store to pick up porn movies 'look just like you, me, or
anyone you've ever met.'"
By this point, the Teenwire reader has gone beyond thinking about
self-esteem and is now thinking about what it's like to watch the
perfect bodies in an actual porn video. And once again, Teenwire is
there to help. The article ends with the link, "For more info, check
out Scarleteen: Sex Education for the Real World."
Scarleteen, founded by lesbian pornographer Heather Corinna, features a
shop where young people can buy products from-of course-Toys in
Babeland. Score one for the cross-marketing geniuses at Planned
Parenthood. What's more, when young visitors to Scarleteen and Toys
in Babeland purchase pornography or sadomasochistic sex toys, no one at
either site will ask them their age.
The theme that "responsible" people should feel free to indulge
sexual urges rather than control them for the sake of a higher
goal-and that masturbation, with or without sex toys, is a laudable
means of self-discovery-is repeated constantly in Teenwire. It's
even on the site's promotional gear. A Teenwire-brand school-supply
bag bears the legend, "Being a good partner means having the right
tools." An eraser states, "Rub away the confusion." Then
there's the pen that has printed along its side, "Different strokes
for different folks." And the brightly colored rulers-for
schoolchildren-saying, "Does Size Matter?"
Some of the writings on the site read like child erotica, with teens
giving firsthand accounts of their sexual experiences. One writer who
calls himself "Halcyon" writes in an essay titled "Springtime in
My Trousers":
I'm masturbating twice a day. This is remarkable, as I haven't been
able to break the once-a-day barrier since I was in Jr. High. I'm a
testosterone milkshake. And I'm having physical manifestations to
prove it. . . . I haven't felt this randy in years. I wonder if my
voice is gonna change again?
Just Don't Do It
A parent reading such puerile and sophomoric prose written under the
guise of instruction could be forgiven for thinking that Planned
Parenthood's goal is simply to sexualize children.
In July 2004, when South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds, at the urging of
Sioux Falls Bishop Robert Carlson, took the bold and principled stance
of removing a Teenwire link from the state library's website, Planned
Parenthood attacked him as a censor. Yet the organization seems to have
no concept of self-censorship when offering advice to children at the
most vulnerable age, on issues that affect their physical and emotional
health on the deepest level.
"Responsible choices," made according to Teenwire's "just do
it" philosophy, are not enough. Children need to be taught to make
the right choices. For that, they need a curriculum based on a strong
moral foundation, which Planned Parenthood is clearly unwilling to
provide.
Dawn Eden is a freelance writer covering faith and politics. She
maintains an online presence with The Dawn Patrol
http://www.dawneden.com/blogger.html
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| User: "Paul Duca" |
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| Title: Re: Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's BestTechniques |
09 Jan 2006 08:16:15 PM |
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Do YOU think you can do any better, Words?
Paul
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| User: "Parsifal" |
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| Title: Re: Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques |
09 Jan 2006 04:24:28 AM |
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Get a life...
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques |
09 Jan 2006 10:40:16 AM |
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On 8-Jan-2006, "words of trash" <wordsoftash201@hotmail.com> wrote:
[snip crap]
Stay killfiled, loser.
Susan
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| User: "MarkA" |
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| Title: Re: Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques |
09 Jan 2006 06:52:09 AM |
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On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:37:00 -0800, words of truth wrote:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-03-057-r
The Young & the Hot-Wired
Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity's Best Techniques
by Dawn Eden
Readers are warned that this report includes quite graphic language from
Planned Parenthood's website.
In January of this year, when a 16-year-old boy had been charged with a
felony for killing his girlfriend's unborn child by striking her stomach
with a baseball bat, Planned Parenthood acknowledged that a tragedy had
occurred. But the organization's definition of tragedy was far different
from that of prosecutors.
For Planned Parenthood, the tragedy was not that the unborn child was
killed. It was that the abortion was done outside a doctor's office, with
all the legal and medical protections that such an environment provides.
According to The Detroit News,
Lori Lamerand, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Mid-Michigan
Alliance, said pregnant teens have safer options available than
terminating a pregnancy without a doctor. "It's always tragic when people
resort to such drastic measures, when there are appropriate, safe medical
measures available," Lamerand said.
So, you think it's better to induce an abortion by hitting someone with a
baseball bat, than by having a medical abortion? You are truly sick.
--
MarkA
(still caught in the maze of twisty little passages, all different)
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