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America in the looking glass
By Craige McMillan
We now know -- a year late, thanks to The Washington Post -- that while Congress investigated President Clinton's sexual proclivities in the Oval office, seventh and eighth-graders in Washington, D.C.'s exclusive suburban middle schools were looking into the subject, too. ("Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex," by Laura Sessions Stepp, The Washington Post, A1, July 8, 1999). "What's the big deal? President Clinton did it," one of the girls told her mother. "They would argue they were acting responsibly," another mother said, voicing concerns about AIDS and abstinence. "Adolescents as young as 11 are not prepared for its emotional repercussions," the Post wrote, quoting Beth Knobbs, director of pupil services in Talbot County. "It's now the expected minimum behavior," said Michael Schaffer, health-education supervisor in Prince George's County for the past 15 years. But it won't take Mr. Schaffer's full 15-year career for the sexually-transmitted diseases -- gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes -- to appear in his young charges. And another 15 years won't erase all the emotional scars. "The times, they are a'changing," proclaimed a popular ballad from the 1960s. And it looks like the changes, Mom and Dad, they have arrived. Your "young adolescent" son or daughter was only five or six when the Bill and Hillary's political and media elite proclaimed "character doesn't matter." It was all the permission much of America needed to elect as first family the couple who mirrored their own values. Did your son or daughter hold your hand and go into the voting booth with you, while you pulled the lever or punched the dots for "it's the economy, stupid" Bill Clinton and Al Gore? Parents will appreciate the intimate setting their children chose for their activities. Quoting the Post:
The Post characterized these activities as "relationships" and said they might "last a couple of weeks or fizzle in a few hours." A Reston seventh-grader even "attempted to arrange oral sex dates between classmates for money." A lot of vice cops would be more plain in how they characterized such a "relationship." "Young adolescents have difficulty negotiating sex in a relationship," explained Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman to the Post. "Girls in eighth grade are particularly vulnerable because relating to boys has never been more important." "I didn't really know what it was," an eighth grade girl who found herself with a boy she "kinda liked" at a party told the Post. But he showed her. "I realized pretty soon that it didn't make him like me," she said. Maybe that's because what eighth grade girls really want is a Mom to explain what's happening to her body -- and a Dad to wrap his familiar arms around her and say, "I love you sweetheart. Now tell me -- what did you learn in school today?" But Mom's career meant she didn't have the time. And her salary helped to make the mortgage payments on a house they couldn't really afford. Maybe that was the evening, like so many others, that Dad had to work late again, or have dinner with a client, or sat in traffic as he and his SUV clones stared past one another on city streets and freeways. No, it isn't any fun. But somebody's got to make the car payments, and a private school isn't cheap. Why, I wonder, do we expect bad trees to deliver good fruit? We wring our hands and fret that schools might endorse the Judeo-Christian values that gave them birth, yet we have no problem when those same schools endorse seventh-grade sex by passing out how-to manuals in "health class" and condoms from the principal's candy jar. We teach Billy and Judy that all truth is relative -- and that their relatives evolved from pond scum. We suppress any mention of the Grand Designer, and yet act surprised when little Billy and Judy adopt our distorted worldview. Mom and Dad tell pollsters that our president's sex life while on the public payroll and representing our nation in the Oval office is his own business, but the same parents have "tears in their eyes" when they learn from a middle-school principal that their thirteen-year-old daughters have acted on Mom and Dad's clearly expressed beliefs. Perhaps the pain comes from the memories. Maybe the parents crying in that classroom as the truth rang in their ears were the ones who earlier looked into a daughter's innocent five-year-old eyes as she held Mom or Dad's hand in the voting booth, and abruptly dismissed her childish little question: "Mommy, what's character -- and why doesn't it matter?" Craige McMillan is a commentator for WorldNetDaily. |
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COPYRIGHT MIA T 2006