Planned Parenthood Says Pet 'Em While They're Young

"Our hearts are restless until they rest in You."—St. Augustine

"We are sexual from birth, and sexual expression is a basic human need throughout our lives."—Planned Parenthood

That second quote, with its creepy linguistic symmetry, begins Planned Parenthood's "White Paper" on "Adolescent Sexuality."

It goes on to say, "The initiation of sexual intercourse during adolescence is a recognized pattern of behavior in the U.S. (Singh & Darroch, 1999),"

—This is known as the "everybody's doing it," or "50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong," school of psychology—

"—and by no means a recent one—premarital intercourse among young people, including many adolescents, was common well before World War II (Laumann et al., 1994)."

Ah, birds did it, bees did it, Grandma when she was as tall as your knees did it. But, several more paragraphs into the report, some sort of switch goes off in PP's anonymous author and the organization's real agenda emerges (emphasis theirs):

"One of the most misguided and destructive messages that endangers adolescent health and life during this age of AIDS emanates from a vocal minority bent on suppressing or willfully ignoring the truth about sexual activity among adolescents in America. Under the guise of protecting our youth they declare, inaccurately, that premarital sex among adolescents is a relatively new and corrupt social phenomenon. They are not content to teach the benefits of delaying intercourse as one element of reasonable, responsible, and medically accurate sexuality education curricula. They say that society should tolerate no sexual activity among adolescents."

Oh my. This is terrible. Some people are criticizing teen sex under the misapprehension that it is a "new" phenomenon. Clearly, these people have never seen "A Summer Place."

Seriously, I agree with Planned Parenthood that if a behavior has been sanctioned by American society from the nation's birth through the present day, then, with rare exceptions, it shouldn't be changed. So thank you, Planned Parenthood, for finally articulating the argument for preserving traditional marriage.

Except that that's not what they're setting out to do here. No, this is the heart of their message (in their own cloying bold type again):

"We believe that those who seek to legislate or otherwise compel abstinence-only sexuality education, and who uniformly condemn, on so-called 'moral; grounds, all adolescent sexual activity—and, indeed, any non-marital, non-procreative sexual activity at any age—have ceded the moral ground by denying the realities of adolescent development, basic human needs and behavior, and healthy sexual expression."

Note that little aside about "indeed, any non-marital, non-procreative sexual activity at any age."

At any age? At age 4? With an adult?

Planned Parenthood's author doesn't say. It just leaves the suggestion dangling and blabbers on about opponents' "ahistorical, fear-ridden, repressive approach."

Well, I oppose Planned Parenthood, and my approach may indeed be ahistorical, fear-ridden, and repressive. But at least I'm not taking a quarter-billion a year in taxpayer money, telling people to go have "non-marital, non-procreative sexual activity at any age," and then walking the talk by failing to report cases of statutory rape.

I'm also not killing hundreds of thousands of children a year. But you knew that.

TRACKBACK: The Curt Jester describes, from personal experience, the effects of growing up in what Planned Parenthood would describe as an ideal household.
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