Unprotected family values

National Condom Day the latest assault on decency

By Rohit Joy
From the March 2007 Print Edition

            Every year on Valentine’s Day, or V-Day as feminists prefer to call it, the Tang Center sponsors National Condom Day. On this day, volunteers distribute free kits containing contraceptives to students, man information booths about “condom usage, safer sex, sex toys” and eroticization techniques, according to Will Tierney, the program’s student coordinator. Highlights of this year’s celebration of National Condom Day included, according to a report in the Daily Californian, “a hands-on display of sex toys and demonstrations on how to put on condoms by mouth” as well as students “[partnering] up and [assuming] sex positions.”

            The sex paraphernalia distributed on Sproul this year was provided by various health care firms, including Ansell Healthcare Inc. and Biofilm Inc. The stated reason for participating in the program, according to a spokeswoman for Biofilm, was to help “young people practice safer sex.” However, these companies, like the organizers of National Condom Day, most likely had another goal: to promote sex among college students and thereby make them regular users of their products, thus boosting their profits.

 Liberals’ silent reaction to two health care corporations taking advantage of college students to pad their bottom lines by promoting early sexual activity stands in stark contrast to their attitude toward tobacco companies advertising to minors. In a March 1998 radio address, former President Bill Clinton berated the tobacco industry for “selling cigarettes to our children,” talked about how he had taken steps to “educate” children about the health effects of tobacco, and proposed restrictions on “tobacco ads aimed at young people, so our children can’t fall prey to the deadly threat of tobacco.”

 If the above restrictions work, why not also ban positive depictions of early sexual activity on television shows intended for teenagers? Instead of promoting “safer sex,” why can’t schools run campaigns promoting abstinence until marriage with the same intensity and fervor with which they run anti-smoking campaigns?  The answer to these questions is that there is an agenda underway to undermine the traditional family as the fundamental unit of society.

 The movement to dispense with the nuclear family began in the 1920s. In Death of the West, Pat Buchanan writes about how Georg Lukacs, realizing that the Marxist revolution had not been successful because of the prevalence of family values in the West, “instituted a radical sex education program for Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures.”

 According to Buchanan, “Luckacs’ purpose in destroying promoting licentiousness among women and children was to destroy the family, the core institution of Christianity and Western culture,” to create an environment conducive to the spread of Marxism. In 1923, Lukacs and others from the German Communist Party set up the Frankfurt School, a social science institution with the purpose of doing just that.

 The revolution Lukacs started in Europe in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution did not take hold in the United States until the latter part of the 20th century. During the 1950s, the nuclear family was mostly intact. Prospects for the American family took a dramatic turn for the worse in the 1960s, when the Frankfurt School–inspired “sexual revolution” caused rampant promiscuity among college students. The surge in sex outside of marriage led nature to exact an awful retribution in the 1980s, when the AIDS virus came to the United States and infected millions of Americans over the years.

 The rapid growth in people living with AIDS and other STDs has led to a demand for “comprehensive” sex education in schools and colleges, under which students are instructed in use of contraceptives. Many schools, UC Berkeley among them, include free condom distribution as part of their program. Proponents of such an approach argue that some teenagers will be sexually active regardless of what moral values they are taught and it is imperative that they be told about methods other than abstinence to protect themselves from disease.

 There are numerous shortcomings to this approach to preventing STDs. The first is that contraception never guarantees protection. Only abstinence is 100 percent effective. More importantly, “comprehensive” sex education develops in children a casual view of sexuality severed from marriage and reproduction. As a result, these children are more likely to have sex before marriage and less likely to remain faithful to their spouses once they marry, leading to the astronomical illegitimacy and divorce rates seen today.

Frankfurt School–types may rejoice at the breakdown of families because it makes their favorite Marxist programs more popular, the best example being universal preschool, since single parents cannot stay at home to care for their children. Conservatives, on the other hand, should be outraged by programs like National Condom Day because, in glorifying premarital sex, they tear away at the fabric of society and build support for socialism to boot.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting the Patriot