Jane Jimenez

July 23, 2004

“Come on,” Lynetta pressed.

There was precious little time left before curfew in the dorm.  Betty had promised to follow her down to the snack bar where Lynetta planned to “bump into” the latest “cute guy” she had staked out on their college campus in Rochester, New York.

Only minutes later, Lynetta’s mission accomplished, Betty found herself trapped with the group at the snack bar table across from a complete stranger.  John.

The conversation was easy and lively when suddenly the group broke into giggles.  John leaned back in his chair, slapping the table with laughter.  He captured Betty’s heart right then and there.

Unfortunately, as he walked her back to the dorm that night, she was so shy she couldn’t manage to speak.  Looking at his Ohio high school letter jacket, she finally thought of something to say.  “How do you say that?” Conneaut, she pointed to the name of his town.

John was Betty’s first kiss.  In 1960 language, they “made out a lot.”  But they both knew they would not “go all the way.”  They held to those standards for three years, saving sex for married life.

Betty remembers the night John proposed in the car after dinner.  “He was so cute, so nervous.  I can’t imagine that he thought I might say no.”  One year later on June 4, 1966, in a quiet small-town ceremony, John and Betty became Mr. and Mrs. Arthurs.

The Arthurs are in their 50s today, and their children Julie and Rob are each grown and married with children.  John and Betty were very close to them as they grew up.  They could always talk.  About anything.

Both Julie and Rob remained abstinent until their wedding days. Including John and Betty’s parents, the Arthurs have a tradition of abstinence–until-marriage through three generations.

Nobody remembers any pounding lectures about abstinence.  They are a distinctly gentle family, ready to laugh at the silly and embarrassing things every family experiences.  Betty had been a nurse, and household conversations were always frank and honest.  Julie tells her, “Well, I respected myself, and I wanted to make something of myself.”  She married Mike in 1989 at the age of 20 after a one-year courtship.

Her brother Rob met his girlfriend Heather when he was 16, and they married on June 19, 1993.  Rob was 21.  His reason for staying abstinent?  Looking at Mom and Dad, he tells them, “You always trusted us.  We didn’t want to betray your trust.”

My friend Betty, her husband, her parents…and her two grown children…they all have a lot to teach us.

There are those who want us to give up on our children.  They tell us that teaching children to stay abstinent until marriage is a hopeless task.  If we were to believe their gloomy projections, our kids are “going to have sex anyway.”  They hand us a box of condoms, advising us this is the best we can do for our children.

My friend Betty thinks better.

Statistics give us reason to listen to her.  More teens today are choosing to stay abstinent.  Over 54% of high school teens in 2001 have not had sex.[1]  That’s an amazing success story when you consider the social climate for these teens and the steady pressure on them to become sexually active.

It makes one wonder what those statistics would be if adults really believed in our children. We believe kids can say no to drugs…and tobacco…and to drunk driving.  And we back up our message with a culture that gives an uncompromising message that these behaviors are irresponsible and dangerous.

The facts are in about teen sex.  It is dangerous and leads to serious lifelong consequences.  That’s enough reason to consider it irresponsible behavior.  And those are the best reasons possible for parents and teachers to begin to promote and believe in the abstinence message…all of it.  We need to believe in our teens again.

The next time you want to give up, remember my friend Betty.  We will never achieve a goal we fail to set or make a touchdown we don’t work for.  If Betty can do it, and her husband, parents, and children…then maybe we can, too.

[1] 2001 Youth Risk Behavior Survey Results, Division of Adolescent and School Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  [http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dash/yrbs/data/2001/index.html] at 11/26/03.

MORE ON ABSTINENCE

May 14, 2004:    Order in the Courtroom!

June 4, 2004:     AIDS:  Importing the Cure

See Archives for past editorials.

May 21, 2004

My dad was a lifelong smoker.  He tried his first cigarette at eleven years old, and the habit stayed with him until his death at 62.

My father died of lung cancer.  I tried to convince him to stop. Research on smoking was mounting everyday.  Smoking kills.

The biggest challenge to my pleas to dad came from other smokers.  At least once each year a major newspaper would print the photo of a hundred-year-old man who swore he made it to the century mark by smoking a cigar every day.  Mr. Exception.

Mr. Exception broke the rules on smoking, and he won.  We break rules all the time, and we make it.  We cross the street without looking, we forget to floss, we dash to the store and leave our seatbelt undone.  And we survive.

Nowhere does this rule of the exception shine brighter than with the subject of marriage.  Ms. Exception…she proves that marriage doesn’t matter.  She had ten children and raised them all herself, the veritable Enjoli woman who brought home the bacon and fried it up in the pan …by herself and for herself…and her brood of ten.  And that’s not all.

All ten children made it through college with PhDs, and today they drive Porsches and live in mansions on hundred-acre estates.  As a group, the terrific ten have developed the cures to the top twenty diseases worldwide.  Mankind will survive now, thanks to them. And they owe it all to their single mom who sacrificed everything in life to make it happen.  If she can do it, you can, too.

Single moms deserve our applause for making it.  But parents beware.  In our hurry to encourage women who raise families on their own, we run the risk of making the exception the new rule.

In the modern era of cultural redefinitions, Ms. Exception has been lifted high on a modern pedestal to make a woman feel guilty that she ever wanted something as ordinary as a husband, as common as a simple home where two people work together in love and harmony to raise two children.

How mundane.

How ordinary.

How limited in imagination!

Surveying the American landscape with its single moms and children, the visual message for our children is clear.  Marriage is an option.  But it isn’t necessary.

Movie actresses lead the charge.  Slipping in and out of marriages like changing dresses in the boutique, using their ample cleavage to lure the next boyfriend into a romp and a magazine cover, they vow that life was never so good as when they were freed from the shackles of traditional families founded on lifelong marriages and fidelity.

By failing to embrace marriage, we effectively give our daughters a new vision of the future.  We tell them, “You could be the next Ms. Exception, if only you would dream and plot and plan and scrape and skimp and save and struggle.  You could do it all on your own.  You could.”

After all, they could be the next Ms. Exception?

Is that the best we have to offer them…to let them struggle for success on their own?  What about the tried and true formula?  Marriage?

As one American voice, we could actually admit that social engineering has done nothing to create a better chance for success than a marriage between a man and a woman who love and honor each other till death do they part.  We could set marriage as a goal for our children and work to teach them how to succeed.

Where better for children to learn the true magic of unconditional love than in a family where Father and Mother model the daily work of giving and forgiving, of taking turns, of sharing the sublime and the mundane with the one special person they gave their life to?

Sure, it’s not easy.  It takes commitment and hard work…planning, forgiving, regrouping, and sacrificing.  But, for those who make it, the joy of a family together throughout a lifetime makes it all worthwhile.

The choice is fairly simple.  We can actively teach and guide our children to plan for and make families through marriage.

Or…we can let them do it themselves.  On their own.  They could be the next Ms. Exception.  Wow!  Imagine that!

See Archives for past editorials.

April 23, 2004:   m…m…m…Married?

May 14, 2004:   Order in the Courtroom!