Gay Marriage Laws Sacrifice Principles for Tolerance

Restricting rights is a bad precedent. But laws around the country legalizing gay marriage aren't about winning freedoms, they're about making divergent lifestyles seem normal. That means reeducation, starting in our public schools.

Most Americans accept the idea of giving lifetime gay couples access to benefits similar to those of married couples. What scares many is that this new found tolerance will go wild in sex education curriculum for teens.

For the small proportion of students who identify themselves as gay, learning how to perform anal sex may be validating, but for the rest of the students it will simply promote gender blindness in the name of tolerance. We don't need a blanket policy for all sex education. There are some things all students need to know. There are others that should be handled privately.

Gender blindness is a kind of institutionalized self deception. This is always disturbing. But the most disturbing self deception is the kind meant to remove the social and self conscious shame of casual sex. And the result won't be a healthy respect for human rights, but an anything goes mentality. No one wants to be seen as the intolerant one. For teens, peer pressure can outweigh self respect, wishes of their parents, or their own beliefs about propriety and wisdom. Can anyone who has gone to high school deny this?

This is not a call for abstinence only education, but neither should we be coaching kids to go out and have sex, gay or heterosexual. They don't need this kind of pressure from their teachers too. Training people to have sex should never have become the job of the public school system.

What the public schools can and should do is teach kids how to live in a diverse society. This goes hand in hand with fortifying self respect. Sex is a separate discussion. But in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is already legal, homosexual relationships have begun being taught to kindergartners as “normal” without the consultation of parents. Religious organizations have been targeted as well.

“But sexuality is a natural thing and teens shouldn't feel ashamed to explore it,” some may say. Ford forbid! Kids, by definition, don't need to feel comfortable talking about sex. They should blush at the subject. And teens are kids. Sexual maturity doesn't prepare someone to deal with issues of pregnancy, STDs, or the complex emotions of sexual relationships. Neither do demonstrations of putting condoms on bananas. A little shame is a good thing.

What did people do to deal with these issues before we became so enlightened? Well, these are only widespread problems for a promiscuous society. Self discipline is a lost value to many of us. It's what this country was built on. The decay of self discipline is nothing less than reverse evolution.

How can anyone who values a loving relationship, gay or straight, support legislation that would lead to policies that encourage young people to hump anything with a pulse? People who are fighting for that condition ought to be honest and differentiate themselves from those who really believe “you can't help how you were born”. Do we want a safe place for people to live with their loved ones, or do we want to be surrounded by people who use sex as a way to scratch an itch so we don't have to deal with our own shame?

Shame and self discipline are two things that keep our society from destroying itself. If these attributes have to be abolished to make room for gay marriage or anything else, then it's not worth it.