Category Archives: Family Issues

NARAL: The Finer Points of Vulgarity

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

July 18, 2005

You’ve got to hand it to NARAL.  They really know how to get their point across.

NARAL Pro-Choice Washington wants to make it clear.  No ambiguous, vague, uncertain, unintelligible, nebulous, amphibological message from NARAL.  Absolutely none!

Do you want to know what the leading proponent of abortion thinks about healthy sexual behavior?  NARAL wants everyone to know!  Screw Abstinence. 

Just to make sure you don’t miss it, they scream at the top of their voices.  Throw your hands up and say it loud: “Screw Abstinence!!!”  They tell us at the bottom of their e-mail flyer to let everyone know:  Print Out Flyer & Help Promote Screw Abstinence.

This is not just political rhetoric and subtle behind-the-scenes lobbying.  They are throwing a party.  They are raising money.  And there is something for everyone at NARAL’s funfest:

  • A sex ed class for adults performed by Seattle theatre’s hottest sketch comedy group
  • Tips on Sexy Sex by Sex-positive purveyors of adult toys
  • A Screw Driver drink ticket
  • A Screw Abstinence T-Shirt

If there is anything good that comes from vulgarity in your face and over the top, this must be it.  We now know for sure and without a doubt, what NARAL values and elevates as their ultimate ideal for healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors.

For the past thirty years parents and health experts have agonized over the high rates of unwed teen pregnancy and the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).  Untold hours have been spent debating how to best educate young people on healthy choices related to sex.

Abstinence…purity…chastity…modesty…concepts of self-control and restraint have made a comeback.  But it has been a hard fought battle.  At every turn, there are opponents to abstinence.  Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and NARAL have worked hard to convince us abstinence education won’t work.

Now, thanks to NARAL, we know one of the major reasons abstinence education struggles.  It is mocked and ridiculed and rejected by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

The finer points of NARAL’s Screw Abstinence party are these.

They trivialize the very essence of healthy choices based on self-restraint and the medical realities of sexual behavior.

They flaunt the outdated term “Safe Sex,” mutating it into “Safer Sex” without one shred of proof that sex toys are harmless games in the hands of promiscuous people.   Safer sex?  Safer than what?

They model for adults over the age of 21 the foundations of mindless, medically illiterate objections to abstinence education.  NARAL doesn’t need a reason to object.  It’s enough to “Come, laugh, learn, socialize and buck the system at NARAL Pro-Choice Washington’s Screw Abstinence Party.”

And perhaps the finest point of all in NARAL’s attack on the healthy attitudes toward sex by America’s young people is this.  When over twenty percent of children relying on the promises of “safer sex” get pregnant this year, NARAL will be there with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU to defend their right to sneak to the nearest abortion clinic without parental consent.

If abstinence education is challenged in its efforts to educate young people about healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors, we finally have the answer…in our faces…over the top…and without a doubt.  Thanks to NARAL.

February 5, 2005:   Sex Without Value

June 6, 2005:   Planned Parenthood’s War Against Choice

Recipe for Families

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

June 13, 2005

Growing up as a city kid, I lived on dreams of life on a farm.  Those farm kids were the luckiest.  They had everything!

Not until my thirties did I have a chance to learn about farm life from an expert.  Pauline, my co-teacher, had grown up on the picture-perfect Iowa farm.  Her strawberry blond hair was set in tight curls that bounced when she laughed.  And she was always laughing.

I loved to hear about cows covered in snow and five brothers always up to mischief.  But the best talk of all was food talk.  Her mother was the proverbial “best cook.”  We always looked forward to Mom’s treats arriving with Pauline on Monday mornings.

Pauline had had it all, living on a farm.  But, I soon learned that the trick of having it all was figuring out how to do without…when you didn’t have it all.  Living miles away from town, if you ran out of buttermilk, it was no quick trip to the store.

Smart cooks knew how to grab a lemon and squirt it into milk.  Or if no lemon was on hand…then vinegar.  If no vinegar…then cream of tartar.  And if no vinegar…well, maybe there would be a box of yogurt tucked in the back of the refrigerator.

It turned out that the best farm cooks knew how to make everything out of anything.  If you didn’t have it…then find something else…and substitute.  There was no end to what Pauline’s mom could create.  “Yeah,” Pauline laughed.  “She can even make apple pie without the apples!”

Apple pie without apples?  Pauline shared the secret with me over twenty years ago.  And I still can’t believe it possible.

Sure, I love Ritz Crackers.  The commercials are right, “Everything tastes good on a Ritz.”  But I would never grab a Ritz when I had a craving for an apple.

But, yes, there it is.  Online at AllRecipes, there they are…recipes of crackers, brown sugar, and cinnamon.  Apple pie?

Now I can truly understand how a lot of sugar and cinnamon held together by wet crackers and baked hot on a cold winter night could taste good in the middle of Iowa.  And I can truly understand how a mother could dream up a quick answer for six children, when Dad asks, “What is this?”

Mom could tell them the truth, “These are cracker crumbs buried in sugar…Cracker Pie.”  And the kids would still probably eat Cracker Pie.  But oh, the creativity of that brilliant farm mother who looked at the row of eyes staring up at her and elevated the simple cracker.  Maybe her strawberry blond curls bounced and most likely her eyes twinkled as she answered Dad.  “This is Mock Apple Pie.”

Recipes give us what we want.  But no matter how close to apples one gets with 30 round crackers, if I want an apple pie, I will make it with apples.

Substitutes are good when we need them.  But they are still substitutes.  A serving of five-star Mock Apple Pie has 503 calories, 24 grams of fat, and 448 mg of salt.  That is a poor substitute for 255 calories, 9 grams of fat, and 132 mg of salt contained in a hot steaming slice of five-star real apple pie.

Substitutes may be just what we need to make it through the tough times.  But if we want a recipe for success, the best way to get apple pie is to buy apples.

Another Father’s Day is here.  I think of how important my own father was in shaping our home.  I am grateful for my husband’s part in guiding our children through the hard times and laughing with them in the crazy times.

Most of all, I pray for my son and daughter, that they will value the role of a father enough to build their own families with Dad in the recipe.  There is no substitute like the real thing.

Happy Father’s Day!

 

Mock Apple Pie:   http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mock-Apple-Pie-III/Detail.aspx

Apple Pie:  http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Apple-Pie-by-Grandma-Ople/Detail.aspx

June 18, 2004:   Me Jane…You Tarzan

The Power of a Good Mind

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

May 23, 2005

Their eyes are closed in intense concentration.  Each man has one hand resting lightly on the table, all hands holding onto an invisible handle moving in cadence with the leader’s voice.

Six highly trained men, each of whom commands $28 million dollars of metal and technology are in an empty room, mentally rehearsing the precision movements of a show performed at up to 700 mph, where one misstep will result in immediate death.  They are the Blue Angels.

The selection process for Blue Angel pilots is rigorous.  Each applicant must be a career-oriented, carrier-qualified, active-duty Navy or Marine Corps tactical jet pilot with a minimum of 1,350 flight hours.

Once selected, “Angels” enter into intense training.  At speeds approaching Mach 1, a hesitation of one second can spell disaster.  The squadron focuses stress in a program built around exercise, weight training, cardiovascular health, flexibility training and healthy diet.

It goes without saying that vision is essential to the success of these jet pilots.  Extensive physical exams ensure 20/20 vision that is sustained under intense g-force maneuvers.  But there is another vision required for success as an “Angel.”

Blue Angels, with all the skill, technology, and personnel supporting their own training, must also rely on their individual capacity to sit with eyes closed, visualizing the exact order and movements of their performance, a mental rehearsal of every detail.  Their body can only perform what their mind can envision.

The power of a good mind is central to human success.  Jet pilots “see” their F-18’s speeding through the air before they ever climb into the cockpit.  Mountain climbers fix their eyes on the heights before they ever take the first step.

Vision of success builds success.  It is the ingredient of dreams.  It inspires hope.  It creates endurance through faith built on a picture we see with our mind.

Visions give us dreams.  Lifting her lamp beside the golden door, the Statue of Liberty welcomes the tired and poor of the world to America.  But they arrive on our shore long before their ships set sail.  They arrive first in their dreams and visions of what life might be in a distant land.

What dreams and visions do we inspire in our children?

“We would teach abstinence,” some tell us, “but we know kids are going to have sex anyway.”  A vision of failure is planted.  It is nurtured.  It is cultivated with thoughts of eventual failure.

Looking below, seeing the possibility of eventual failure, picturing ourselves falling off the mountain, what good does that do?  Yet, that is what some would have us believe about our kids.

People came to America inspired by a vision.  Pilots train with a vision.  Yes, visions must be chased and caught.  They require something of your own blood sweat and tears.  But they give us the picture of heaven on earth, a target, a place to aim our aspirations.

Beware of people who expect us to fail.  Listen for words predicting disaster.  As we speak, so shall we think.  And as we think, so shall we do.

The best educational program begins not with books and lessons and charts and graphs.  It begins in the mind of a person who has captured the vision of success.

And the best teachers are those who can inspire the vision in others, who can train the eyes upward for the climb and paint a picture of what it will be like when you mount the peak, plant your flag and claim success.

March 14, 2005:  Does Abstinence Work?

October 29, 2004:   Food for the Brain

Liberty or Libertine?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

May 16, 2005

Give me liberty, or give me death!

Fifth grade is the year for American history, when the Constitution is broken into three branches of government, the Bill of Rights is memorized, and famous patriots stir our imagination.  American children grow up, nurtured on the ideals of independence and freedom.

Patrick Henry lives on today at Colonial Williamsburg, America’s largest living history museum.  In body and voice, Richard Shumann recreates Henry and the words he used to stir colonists to battle.

In March 1775, Patrick Henry urged his fellow Virginians to arm in self-defense, closing his appeal (uttered at St. John’s Church in Richmond, where the legislature was meeting) with the immortal words:  Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!

Henry, “a Quaker in religion but the very devil in politics,” mobilized the militia only a few hours after the British march on Concord. His words are said to mark the beginning of the American Revolution in Virginia.

Liberty, the cause of the American Revolution, burns bright in the minds of Americans as the ultimate cause worth defending.  We want our freedom.  Independence.  Liberty.  No one is going to bar our way, get in our face, tell us what to do.  America is the land of the free.

But there is another Henry.  And another quote.  This Henry speaks of liberty, too.  But more to the point, he speaks about the purest essence of liberty, the distillation of what our freedom must be in order to allow us to be free.

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.  –Henry M. Robert

 So, who is this Henry?  Henry Martyn Robert was born May 2, 1837, in Robertsville, South Carolina.  Active in his community, he was chosen to chair a committee and was embarrassed by his inability to handle their meetings effectively.

Henry’s work in the army allowed him to travel and study the different systems used in various communities to order their meetings.  He envisioned a uniform set of rules used by all people that would allow people from different towns to work together effectively.

Encouraged by friends, Henry wrote a book and finally found a publisher willing to gamble on a printing of 4,000, enough copies to last a couple of years.  Instead, the first copies of Robert’s Rules sold out in a few months.

Henry M. Robert died in 1923 in New York, leaving us an important lesson about liberty.  Unfettered and unrestrained, liberty is a freedom that will enslave us.  Order, rules, and governance are the friends of freedom that protect us from ourselves.

Too much liberty corrupts us all.  –Terence (185 BC – 159 BC)

Liberty:  Defined in simple terms, it is the power to do as one pleases.  But if one is thorough in reading to the end of the definition, the reins on freedom are spelled out:  permission especially to go freely within specified limits.

Libertine:  A word no longer needed in America where everything goes, it has a lesson to teach.  A person who is unrestrained by convention or morality; specifically : one leading a dissolute life…a life dissolving through unrestrained liberties?

Dissolute:  lacking restraint; especially : marked by indulgence in things (as drink or promiscuous sex) deemed vices <the dissolute and degrading aspects of human nature.  Is this a concept Americans are able to…even willing to…understand?

As we work to teach our children the value of saving sex until marriage, we must look ourselves full face in the mirror.  We must admit that our culture has used our love affair with liberty to enslave us to our passions.

In a culture that celebrates excess, we must restore the truth about liberty. Give us liberty.  Yes.  But give us also the courage and character to submit our liberty to restraint.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

–Will Durant (1885-1981)

 Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

–Archbishop Ireland

 

SIECUS Redefines Humanity

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

May 9, 2005

 

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.                                  Thomas Sowell

 SIECUS is on the warpath.  If it could have its way, abstinence education would be outlawed.  That’s right.  While parents and legislators are working to develop ways to restore healthy sexual boundaries for our children, SIECUS is mustering its troops for an all-out assault on abstinence education.

SIECUS has a better idea.  As its name implies, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States is fighting to regain control of the definition of “healthy sex” first set forth in 1964 when Mary Calderone left her position as medical director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America to organize and lead SIECUS.

Fortunately for all of us, SIECUS has had forty years to spell out what it wants our children to learn.  At its initial press conference on January 9, 1965, Mary Calderone set out their plan.  SIECUS would “perhaps take positions on problems of sexuality in America.”

On the surface, SIECUS assures the public it wants children to develop a healthy respect for their sexuality.  It even suggests that SIECUS is “for abstinence,” too.  But the devil is in the details.  And we can be grateful that its long-time executive director Debra Haffner took time to spell out her ideas for raising teens.

A passage from Debra Haffner’s article “Safe Sex and Teens” in the September-October 1989 SIECUS Report is quite open about what it wants for our children.  “Colleagues and I have fantasized about a national ‘petting project’ for teenagers….A partial list of safe sex practices for teens could include: Talking, Flirting, Dancing, Hugging, Kissing, Necking, Massaging, Caressing, Undressing each other, Masturbation alone, Masturbation in front of a partner, Mutual masturbation.  Teens could surely come up with their own list of activities.”

Based on magazine ads, movies and television…yes…teens “could surely come up with” quite a list of sexual activities.  But is that what we want our children to do?  Indulge in sexual promiscuity?

Even more amazing than the list of extracurricular sex suggestions from Haffner’s article is the general premise of SIECUS that these activities are a form of abstinence from sex.  In fact, some creative educators actually coined a special word for this brand of abstinence…outercourse…as opposed to intercourse.

In the old days, before enlightenment by the likes of SIECUS and Planned Parenthood, these “outercourse” activities were just the types of activities that led many a teen into intercourse.  If avoiding intercourse is their true goal, one has to wonder why Haffner and her colleagues felt that empowering teens to explore highly charged eroticism is preferable to abstinence.

The history of SIECUS provides endless examples of this type of sexual conundrum…having more sex to avoid having sex.  In 1977, Time began its article, “Cradle-to-Grave Intimacy,” quoting Mary Calderone saying that a child has a fundamental right “to know about sexuality and to be sexual”.

“Cultivating” the sexuality of children was of prime importance to Calderone and others.  Adopting a Kinseyan philosophy that children are sexual from birth, few in this circle of “sexperts” saw any need to restrict the sexual behaviors of people…and children.  Their concerns actually focused on repelling any attempts to limit or restrain sex, seeing these as repressive and counter to human design.

In 1981, Calderone co-authored The Family Book about Sexuality that asserted, “The major effects of such incidents [molestation] are caused not by the event itself but by the outraged, angry fearful, and shocked reactions of the adults who learn of it….It is these immoderate reactions which may cause whatever psychological damage occurs.”

Today, SIECUS guidelines for sex education are 112 pages long.  Read carefully.  You will find Calderone’s and Haffner’s same philosophy on sex underlying the core ideas of SIECUS and the activities they recommend for children.

Is it any wonder that SIECUS would take offense at abstinence education?  Programs that encourage teens not to engage in sex and that present information demonstrating abstinence until marriage is the healthiest and happiest choice…SIECUS never has been fond of limiting sex.

Knowing SIECUS is the surest way to understand the reasons for their attacks on abstinence. And know this…it is also the surest way to understand the value of restoring the natural definition of human behavior.

Sex is a magical gift of bonding and procreation between a husband and wife.  Until then?  For our teens?  Abstinence is a choice that protects and empowers.

 

 May 2, 2005:  Who Is SIECUS?

November 19, 2004:  KINSEY: Brave New World?