Doreen Beagan
When the environment in which we live and work and socialize is drenched in sexuality, does “innocence” still have meaning? Is “wholesome” understandable any more?
There seems to be a frenzied urgency in the drive to fill even the youngest Maritime minds with unnecessarily explicit sexual information, while simultaneously stripping away their traditional protections. The goal, supposedly, is to give our children more fulfilling lives.
A song by Newfoundlander Kevin Blackmoor (Buddy Wasisname) asks: “Is you ‘appy? Oh, is you ‘appy?” If the ever-more-explicit sex ed approach worked, our answer would be a resounding “Yes!” But what does the evidence show?
A decade ago, Rachel MacAusland of Charlottetown was part of the Chastity Challenge team that spoke to over 30,000 young people in Eastern Canada about chastity and the emotional impact of premature sex. “There’s no pill or condom for a broken heart,” she told them.
But today, there is even more premature sexual activity, pornography, aberrant sex and sexual disease. At least a third of marriages break down. Over 100,000 babies a year are aborted. That suggests a lot of broken hearts and evokes memories of Munch’s painting, The Scream.
CBC reports that Canada has 1.1 million “mature single, never-married adults”. Half don’t expect to get married at all; 60 per cent say having children is not important. Forty-four per cent of Americans aged 30-44 (well over 52 million) are unmarried, though many live together. This is the child-raising age, but they tend not to have children. The U.S. Department of Health and Social Services says it will be “a continuing trend.”
A year ago, a Catholic Register editorial talked about “the new loneliness.” On the same page, a letter said: “I know many people are led into such ‘unnatural’ (homosexual) partnerships due to loneliness … I, too, used to be extremely lonely for a long time and then was invited to become a lesbian.” Do these suggest joy and happiness?
The current move to ban mandatory retirement was predictable because, as Public Services International acknowledges, “in many nations, by the year 2007, more people will be leaving the workplace than entering it.” Media and government doublespeak call the ban “extending the right to choose”or “returning to those forced to retire, the right to be contributing members of society.” No one acknowledges the connection with our avoidable “birth dearth.”
Population Action International calls itself “an independent policy group working to make clear the linkages between population, reproductive health, the environment and development.” Recently, their spokesperson told CBC that Canada “must recruit workers. Our future depends on immigrants. Our economic future is very much tied up with the burgeoning population in India.”
Paradoxically, PAI and friends still stress the urgent need for contraceptives and abortion to control overpopulation – and are listened to.
One might expect our leaders of government, members of the Supreme Court and heads of universities to show by their decisions and conduct that they are wise and clear-sighted, the most honourable and revered, the most ethical and moral citizens in the country. But their decisions have permitted the destruction of so many tiny Canadians that major social and economic problems now loom large on the horizon. And still a university decided to confer an honourary doctorate on the foremost Canadian promoter of abortion.
Legislation brought forward to protect “the rights of sex trade workers” to carry on an immoral and mutually destructive practice is widely praised.
Government leaders are hell-bent on declaring that two men or two women can be a husband and wife – not a facsimile, but the real thing. Whether such couples end up “married” or not, one thing they will not do is replenish our dwindling population.
