- For every tree is known by its own fruit … from thorns men
do not gather figs, nor from a bramble bush do they gather grapes.
–Jesus Christ
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:
- [A ninth grader] attended two parties at friends’ houses this
past semester where several couples engaged in oral sex. … At a middle
school … officials this year learned through the grapevine that a girl
and a boy, both eighth graders, had engaged in oral sex in a crowded
study hall. The incident followed by only a few months a similar event
on a school bus of seventh-graders returning from a field trip. … “We
were at a party at this house, a whole bunch of guys and girls,” one boy
said. “We planned out who would go into the bathroom, who would go into
the closet. That pioneered everything.”
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?”
Team Trump: Young, smart and ready to rumble
Bucky Fox