“There is no safe sex,” asserts Robert noble, M.D., professor of Medicine at the University of Kentucky, in a full-page article in Newsweek magazine, April 1, 1991.
“I’m an infectious-diseases physician and an AIDS doctor to the poor. Passing out condoms to teenagers is like issuing them squirt guns for a four-alarm blaze. We should stop kidding ourselves,” he said.
Dr. Noble’s tough stand against condoms is part of a growing chorus saying that condoms do not, and cannot, prevent the spread of AIDS.
Public schools
Are administrators and teacher’s public, separate and private schools listening?
Some, fortunately are, but many are not.
Condom machines for high schools have been rejected by public school boards from Kitimat, B.C., to Scarborough and Oshawa, Ontario, to Chatham, N.B.
But they have been accepted by school districts in St. Albert, Alberta (2 schools); by North York (21 schools); and the City of Toronto boards (26 schools) in Ontario; by Montreal’s Blainville-Deux Montagnes Board (2 schools) in Quebec; and by St. John’s District 19 Board (2 schools) in New Brunswick.
In Ottawa the two public boards Ottawa and Carleton have opened at least five birth control clinics on school premises, dubbed School-based Health Centres for Sexuality information.
They are financed by the Ontario Ministry of Health.
The same procedure and funding was followed by the large Peel County School Board west of Toronto, where the contraceptive and abortion referral centers are called “Healthy Sexuality Clinics.” (The Interim, March 1989).
A nationwide propaganda drive fuelled by Planned Parenthood and AIDS Committees is swaying governments and school boards to believe that condoms will reduce infection from AIDS. The same people in much the same way convinced the public over a 25-year-long period that contraceptives reduce the number of abortions.
The truth is otherwise.
Contraceptives do not lead to fewer abortions; rather they lead to their increase. Condoms do not protect against AIDS. By misleading young people throughout the country, the propagandists ensure that AIDS will continue to spread. In the process they expose teenagers to both sine and a possible early death.
It’s a kind of Russian roulette they are promoting, not protection.
Catholic schools
The tragedy will be compounded if Catholic school boards throw their own moral teaching overboard and climb on the condom bandwagon. The cry here as elsewhere is that this must be done in the name of compassion.
One such district is the York Region Separate School Board (YSSB). In January of this year one parent wrote the Chairman, Mr. Joseph Virgillio:
“The logic of your argument explaining the Board’s decision to advocate the use of condoms and foam is absurd. The same logic would allow one to teach methods of cheating one one’s taxes or what weapons best to carry into a gang fight. Just because we know that these occurrences do happen does not justify advocating another wrong to protect the perpetrator. The end does not justify the means. Jesus did not say: ‘Go and sin no more, but if you do, use a condom.’”
This puts the finger on the sore spot: when Christians promote condoms, it is not merely a matter of mistaken judgment in a health question but also one of abandoning basic moral principles.
The York region board has taught and recommended the use of contraceptive foam and condoms for at least a year, perhaps longer.
This came to light over the Board’s decision in October 1990 to seek official approval of the practice from the Catholic hierarchy.
It appears this approval was sought through Msgr. Dennis Murphy, Director of the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE), an educational organ of the Ontario Catholic Bishops.
Father Murphy is known to favour the teaching and use of condoms.
Other instances
It must not be thought that the YSSB is the only instance of the current trend. On the contrary, it appears to be only one instance of a very widespread trend.
In the January 1991 issue, we reported on a condom questionnaire used in Welland, Ontario. In our April issue we brought similar evidence from a Catholic school in Pembroke, Ontario and noted that the same questionnaire has appeared elsewhere in the province.
Individual teachers in Catholic schools in Brampton, Kitchener, Ottawa and Toronto are known to have given their students full and detailed explanations of contraceptives and how to use them. In some schools, Planned Parenthood personnel are brought in to do the explaining. In others, the Public Health Nurse or teachers circulate printed information about the nearest birth-control clinics, sometimes with the approval of the administration. Birth control clinics are linked to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion-referral agency in the world and infamous for an anti-family, anti-life philosophy.
Condoms and contraceptives seem to be favoured by both teachers and trustees in many places.
London Trustee
Last fall, one trustee of the Huron-Perth (in Stafford, Ontario) R.C. School Board suggested, “Let’s load them up with condoms.”
Those are exactly the thoughts of some counselors and administrators in the neighbouring London-Middlesex S.S. Board. On February 9, the London Free Press, in its Encounter supplement, carried an article entitled “Sex Education – the Revolution continues.” It covered both public and separate schools. The author discussed condoms and sexual choices and showed how much more advanced schools are today in discussing sex than yesterday.
An example is Michael Lesperance, a social worker for Catholic Central High School’s 1,700 students. He is known as ‘Mitch the therapist’ and prides himself on “picking up where classroom teaching on sexuality ends.”
As far as he is concerned, he deals “with practical issues and the reality of sexuality,” and the reality is that “they’re practicing sex.”
What does he tell the students who practice sex? The article doesn’t say except that further in the story the author, Lynn Marchildon, interviews Peter Valiquet, family life and health coordinator for the Catholic Schools of London and Middlesex. She has Valiquet saying that: “high school guidance counselors and social workers such as Lesperance are available to refer students to birth-control clinics and counseling services if that’s what they want.” That of course, says it all.
Stock-in trade
The Pill, the IUD and the condom are stock-in-trade with these ‘clinics,’ in the event they fail to prevent pregnancy, abortion is the back up.
Mr. Valiquet does not fail to let us know that all this is done out of compassion:
“One of our great concerns is our students would find us wanting in terms of providing them with compassionate understanding and would seek somewhere else in the community to find that, if they knew where to get it.”
He adds: “I don’t think we want to find ourselves in a position where we are trying to withhold information.
Montreal
If London sends the students to the Planned Parenthood’s ‘birth control clinics’ for their condoms, the Montreal Catholic School Board (40 high schools) intends to go one better. It hopes to install condom machines right on the premises. This is the proposal of commissioner Robert Cadotte, who belongs to the Movement for Open and Progressive Schools (MOPS). His group’s proposal has found favourable response in the press.
However, on April 4, the Catholic members managed to get the decision deferred for consultation with other authorities, but they did so with a narrow vote of 11-7. The argument here is the same as elsewhere: we have teenage pregnancies so let’s promote condoms.
The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, meanwhile, has refused to follow the same route, though condoms are shown to Grade nine students.
Saskatchewan
It would lead too far a field to discuss the problems of AIDS teaching in Catholic schools in detail. But problems exist everywhere.
In Regina, Saskatchewan, for example, the Catholic AIDS program aims at total tolerance of homosexual practices. The glossary of terms describes putting the penis in the rectum as a form of intercourse rather than buggery, which is what it is.
It promotes the condom: “If one does have sex with a prostitute a condom should be used.”
On pages 92 and 93 the third of sexual precautions is listed as “avoid exchange of body fluids by using a condom.” It avoids all mention of right or wrong, moral or immoral actions. It leaves a false impression about how AIDS is transmitted and how it is caused.
A number of these same points may be found in almost all Catholic AIDS programs.
For example, in the Toronto area, the Dufferin/Peel Separate School Board program makes a strong point of teaching students that AIDS is not a homosexual disease and that “heterosexuals” can contract it just as easily.
This is directly contrary to the truth.
Conclusion
A large number of Catholic administrators and educators claim to “clearly teach” the Church’s prohibition of pre-marital sex and at the same time as ‘responsible Christians educators’ promote the use of condoms.
This is how it is expressed in the January 29, 1991 recommendation of the YSSB Education Committee:
- That the Board endorse the practice that having clearly taught the teaching of the Church with respect to sexual activity outside of marriage but recognizing the increase in adolescent sexual activity, we should as responsible people and as Christian educators, inform our students about the barrier method of preventing conception and infection, and advocate the use of condoms and foam [which must contain Nonoxynol 9] if students are engaging in sexual activity against the teaching of the Church and their elders’ advice, and
- That, at all times, teachers will stress that abstinence is the only way of ensuring preventing of the HIV infection and affirm the wisdom of our tradition that sexual intercourse should only take place in the loving, life-long faithful, life-giving, married relationship.
Catholic schools cannot have it both ways. To teach the use of condoms and other contraceptives is to nullify the teaching of abstinence from sexual activity.
