According to the US-based Catholic News Service, former feminist and unwed mother Lucetta Scaraffia uses some copiously wonky reasoning to argue that government-mandated sex ed programs are the cause of rampant casual sex, disease and unwanted pregnancy among America’s teens in an August 30 piece in the Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
Scaraffia, a contemporary history professor at Rome’s La Sapienza University and a frequent contributor to L’Osservatore, attacked New York City’s sex ed program, “where students in middle school and high school will be required to attend a semester-long course in sex education.”
Professor Scaraffia claimed that “chastity” will only be included in the New York program “to avoid religious controversy,” which is not true — abstinence is a valid sexual choice, and any sane sex educator would include it as an option. Scaraffia’s further claim is that such government-mandated programs usurp “the rights of parents to educate their children in line with their beliefs and values.” Scaraffia writes:
“The state decides to include compulsory sexual education in schools, and the Catholic Church opposes it, earning the image of an obscurantist force, cruel because of its indifference to the consequences its refusal could have among young people, that is, unwanted pregnancies and disease.”
I’m with her so far! Scaraffia continues:
“It is not clear why public institutions in the West continue to have such magical trust in the effectiveness of sex education,” especially when young people in those countries continue to have precocious, unprotected sex, leading to an increase of disease, pregnancy and abortion, she said.
In Italy, where there is no mandatory sex ed in school, there is a low risk of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease among the young, she said.
“This is thanks to the family, to the loving vigilance of parents over their children, to the fact that kids are not left to themselves with a box of contraceptives as the only defense against their passions and mistakes,” she said.
“It is also thanks to the Catholic Church, which continues to teach that sexual relations are much more than some kind of pleasurable exercise to be practiced in an unbridled and risk-free way,” Scaraffia wrote.
…Human sexuality is not just another subject to be studied in school, “setting out a few dangers it would be best to avoid,” she said.
The real problem is not that young people do not understand what sex is or how to avoid pregnancy and disease; the real problem is the “breakdown of the first institution of moral education, the family,” she said.
If you’re reading Tiny Nibbles, chances are you’re more on my side than Scaraffia’s, so there’s no reason to flog a dead abstinence-only horse. I don’t believe in God, and I only believe in the family insofar as it serves the purposes of an ethical, individualist, and pluralistic society. If parents decide to raise their kids to be abstinent, and then prove crappy enough at doing so that sex ed nudges those kids into orgyville — then, heck, it was bound to happen the first time he or she played Grand Theft Auto or saw a Jay-Z video, right?
The secret to raising kids who behave responsibly is to raise them with self-esteem, not terror, lies, and misinformation. That’s my view.
But thus ends opinion; here begins fact. Modern sex education programs do not, despite Vatican propaganda, hand kids a “box of contraceptives,” as Scaraffia says, and tell them to go fuck their brains out in back-alleys. Painting modern sex ed as a half-assed assault on moral behavior is only possible by ignoring both the theories of modern American sex ed — in which abstinence is presented as one of several potentially effective birth control and safer sex options — in fact, the most effective of all of them — and the reality of modern American sex ed, in which some if not many teachers assigned to cover sex ed are undertrained, uncomfortable with sex and terrified of having some foaming-at-the-mouth fundie parent get them fired for implying gays won’t necessarily die of AIDS. The problem with American sex ed in public schools is not that it’s on-message or off-message, but that it’s not sure WTF the message is supposed to be.
What’s worse, Scaraffia’s use of Italy as a counter-example to loosey-goosey America is both cheap and ugly. She’s Italian, and she had a child out of wedlock, so we’re starting with a wonky statement where the source provides its own debunkery. I’m sure her extensive account of her conversion (available in Italian in several sources on the web) will explain why Scaraffia’s unwed pregnancy qualifies her to dictate to me, an American sexuality educator, that my country’s sex ed programs are wrong and her country’s lack of them is oh-so-right.
But what’s far more annoying is that Italy shows up often in conversations about American morality, supporting much the opposite claim from Scaraffia’s. Among sex-loving types here in America who think our country is a bunch of fuck-hating crankypants who binge-drink because they don’t have wine with dinner, Italy’s the go-to counter-example. It’s the favorite son of nations when it comes to criticizing American (and sometimes British or Germanic) behavior across a wide variety of subjects.
The tendency is to portray Italy as a fun-loving land of lovable hug-monsters who aren’t as uptight as us snug-bungholes of Northern European descent. Have a discussion with any random person about the commonalities of American alcoholism, and you’re as likely as not to get hit with the “conventional wisdom” about Italy, where the citizens practice moderation; they enjoy red wine and live forever, right? They don’t binge because they don’t have to abstain…right? Or is it that Italians have a different view of drinking, and label drinking behavior differently, in a different context?
The same could be said of Italian sexual mores, even if Scaraffia were correct (which she’s not). Trotting out Italy as a groovy counter-example to tight-assed America on any topic of morality or public health is as tired as it is disingenuous, especially when it’s an Italian doing it.
The professor’s claims that Italy doesn’t have sexual problems is a bit hard to reconcile with the rampant reports of adultery among politicians in the Italian press — or the experiences of American women I’ve known who visited there and described being macked on by every Italian guy they passed on the street. I’m not slinging accusations, Proffessore, I’m just pointing out that not everybody shares your rosy old-lady view of Italian sexual morality. There are plenty of “non-former” feminists who might have a thing to say about rampant male infidelity in a still hugely Patriarchal culture. It’s not a given (to me, at least) that everywhere other than the US is “better” in terms of sexual morality.
But even if Scaraffia’s assertions about Italians having fewer sexual problems were true (which, again, I do not concede), why would a single example of a largely homogenous culture create a translatable absolutism about a very different culture? Besides, if you fuck with the numbers enough, you can make Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and South Africa look like they have “fewer sexual problems” than the United States.
Furthermore, the simple fact is that a Vatican writer like Scaraffia has a very different social agenda than the government of New York City should have. Any parent who thinks their kids aren’t making their own choices is deluding themselves. If they’re not making their own sexual decisions now, they will as soon as they figure out they can get away with it. Sex ed should provide kids with options so the end result of their sexual choices are (more or less) what they intended, and what they negotiated with their partner(s).
But to Scaraffia, all but one of those choices — abstinence till marriage — results in eternal damnation. Damnation is a fate utterly incomparable, if you believe in it, to any number of unwanted babies or sexually transmitted diseases. I don’t blame Scaraffia for being troubled by the potential for kids to succumb to it.
But when it comes to the two warring goals of “preventing future public health problems” and “preventing future damnation,” problems, I imagine Scaraffia’s own out-of-wedlock pregnancy is not insignificant in guiding her experience.
I’m certainly not saying that the Professor’s having had an unwanted pregnancy makes her unqualified to speak on the matter — quite the contrary.
But if you were, say, looking for advice on how to keep teens from developing drinking problems…would you ask a white-knuckle drunk who preaches total abstinence for everybody, with no support for those who make alternate choices?
Image: Sexy Nun Costume, from Fancy Dress Costumes UK.
