Category Archives: Media

Planned Parenthood’s War Against Choice

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

June 6, 2005

Choice:  option, alternative, preference, selection, election: suggests the opportunity or privilege of choosing freely

American children are raised on choice.  They cut their teeth on choice.

Stores live or die based on their ability to offer consumers a myriad of choices.  Hotel conglomerates buy up competitors just so they can offer travelers a range of overnight comfort.  Marriott is not just Marriott.  It is Fairfield, Courtyard, Springhill…well, you get the picture.

It’s no wonder that Choice became the mantra of Planned Parenthood.  In their own Encyclopedia of Women’s Health, they list out the reasons “a woman may choose an abortion,” much like you would list the reasons why a girl might choose a pizza.

Choice is captivating.  Marrying choice to freedom, we elevate the power to choose to an inalienable right.  Thus, the sexual revolution was born on the wings of freedom and choice with its emphasis on an array of sexual behaviors from which any man or woman, girl or boy, could simply choose.

And with a sexual revolution came sex education.  In 1970, a training in Philadelphia for Planned Parenthood staff concluded with a day-and-a-half marathon of films and discussion.  The goal of these trainings?  “To lead to desensitization of anxieties surrounding sexual behavior…with a resultant development of understanding and tolerance of the range of sexual behavior.”

For over twenty years, this “tolerance” formed the foundation of sex education programs supported by Planned Parenthood.  They were all about choice…a child’s right to choose sex from a “range” of behaviors…given the “tools” of contraception.  And if it didn’t work out, there was always one more choice.

Planned Parenthood has grown up on choice.  It cut its teeth on choice.

Thus, it is either surprising, alarming or amusing to watch them conduct a war against choice.  This war can be traced back to 1980 when U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton won congressional approval of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA).  Designed as an “almost exact mirror alternative” to Planned Parenthood’s Title X funding, AFLA set a new course for sex education.  Program objectives emphasized adoption, parental involvement, abstinence from sexual intercourse, and pro-family education for teenagers.

Well… that was just a little too much choice for Planned Parenthood to handle.  It geared up to undo the harm of excess choice.  In Congress, it fought to limit and ultimately decrease AFLA funding at the same time that it sought increases in Title X funding.  It continued to exploit its own federal funding streams flowing from over 100 different laws.  In the battle between U.S. funding of Planned Parenthood-style programs and abstinence programs, they had a funding advantage by one report of at least 75:1.

Another tactic to eliminate AFLA programs was an attack on the very meaning of the term “abstinence.”  In a March 1987 report written by Marie Haviland-James for the Planned Parenthood Federation, an attack on the abstinence program Sex Respect set out an extensive list of objections including: “many references…to a ‘spiritual’ dimension of sexuality”, “use of the word ‘baby’ for fetus”,  and “unsubstantiated claims” such as “abstinence has future benefits for teens.”

In its battle against choice, Planned Parenthood had no better friend than Senator Edward Kennedy.  In the 101st Congress, he submitted two bills with the intent to subvert the AFLA programs by repealing the focus on adoption and abstinence, requiring abortion counseling, and repealing the mandate for parental involvement.  No wonder, Senator Kennedy received a Planned Parenthood Memo for March 28, 1989, warmly praising his help in crafting legislation to “prevent teenage pregnancy rather than teenage sex.”

Apparently, for Planned Parenthood, choice is worth defending…as long as it is their choice.

Abstinence education is a choice that parents pay for with hard-earned tax dollars.  It is a choice to have medically accurate and complete information presented to their children that helps build understanding of and reinforcement for abstaining from sexual behavior.  It helps teens define future goals, and it is taught by teachers who value teens enough to believe in them and their ability to succeed.

Abstinence education is a choice.  No school district, nor any parent or student, is forced to listen to or believe in the abstinence message.   It is a choice.

Abstinence education is one choice.  Nothing prevents a school from inviting abstinence educators to their campus in October and inviting Planned Parenthood to their campus in February.

But that’s not good enough for Planned Parenthood.  If they are to have their way, we will be paying our taxes to have one choice, and one choice only…theirs.

Choice?  Hey, Planned Parenthood…what about the choice of people who don’t want your choice?

February 21, 2005:  Sex Without Value

April 2, 2004:   Sex Education:  Spinning the Truth

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

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?

 

Governed by Faith

If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?  –Benjamin Franklin

April 25, 2005

From the Supreme Court, to Congress, to state legislatures, faith is under attack in America.  Or…more rightly expressed…certain faiths are under attack.  People of faith…certain faiths…are being asked to

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

go home…and stay there.

One state leader, questioned by a reporter this month about his faith, admitted the tragic truth.  This leader is informed by his faith.  He is what he believes.

The reporter went straight for the truth.  She asked Mr. Politician if he believed in God, which God, and why.  She asked him if he let his religious views affect his political life.  With simple candor, Mr. Politician stated he was a Christian and that his political views reflected Judeo-Christian moral values.

You would have thought the sky was falling.  The editor slapped a bigger-than-life headline on the interview:  Politician Wants to Convert You!  And readers responded.  A deluge of angry letters denounced this good man.

Culled from their letters, the tirade of invectives is amazing:  sanctimonious, supercilious piety, religious bigotry, quasi-Christian cult, extremist, radical fundamentalist mullah, theocratic fascism, chilling, the Crusades, the scariest person, religious dogma, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi, creationist, astrologer, bigot, dictator, wacko, hell-bent on creating a Nazi-like theocracy, evil intention, theological fanaticism…and finally…duped by his religious fervor, circular logic and disinformation…the Inquisition!

Well, if Christians like Mr. Politician are truly duped by their religious fervor, circular logic and disinformation, they are not the only ones.  Overcome by hatred and distrust of Christians, these letter-writers have lost sight of what religion is…a worldview about man’s place in the world related to the universe, the earth, and his fellow man.  Everyone has a religious belief.  Everyone.

Friedrich Nietzsche had a religious belief.  God is dead.  Hitler had a religious belief.  There is no God.  Stalin had a religious belief.  From his deathbed, he literally shook his fist to the heavens in defiance of “the god” he didn’t believe in.

I have lived on both sides of the religious fence…without God…and with God.  My family and friends represent a wide rainbow of faiths:  Yogis, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Christians, agnostics and atheists.  And I can tell you…everyone is informed by their religious point of view.  Everyone.

Either deception or cowardice leads those who have a belief in the absence of God to pretend that they can separate their own politics from their religious beliefs.  Philosopher Richard Weaver has it right.  Ideas do have consequences.

In How Now Shall We Live, Colson and Pearcey expound on Weaver’s statement.  “It is the great ideas that inform the mind, fire the imagination, move the heart, and shape a culture.  History is little more than the recording of the rise and fall of the great ideas—the worldviews—that form our values and move us to act.”

Consider a small selection from the letters attacking Christian politicians:

  • They’ve found “the superior cultural norms”,
  • They want to highjack our political future and effectively end the possibility of intelligent political discourse and debate,
  • They want to take away my freedom to make decisions for myself…they are telling me what I can and cannot do according to their values, not mine.

One letter writer summed up the offense of being a Christian politician.  Mr. Politician was on a righteous quest of cultural change using thought control.  Another writer agreed.  It is not the right of any particular religious group to assert its moral principles on a society.

Yet, these are the very same people who want to force American society to conform to their own particular faith…the faith that God doesn’t exist, or that if by chance he does exist, he doesn’t care what on earth we do with our lives…or the lives of others.  This sincerely held belief is a faith-view, a worldview that informs every action of those who want Christians to leave public life.

And sadly, rather than engage in “intelligent political discourse and debate” about the consequences of political decisions based on their faith-view, they insist on “highjacking the political future” of all Americans by banishing people of other faiths to the stratosphere…most of all, those intolerant, bigoted Christians.

Somehow, the tolerance of this line of thinking escapes me.  Had these people held American politics in their tight little fists over the past two hundred years, we would never have benefited from the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr.

All lawmakers pass laws that reflect their deeply held beliefs…their faith.  There is no truth to the idea that a man is divided, that somehow he enters politics and votes for laws that violate his worldview.

Thus, for the benefit of those who will be impacted by the laws that reflect the faith of all lawmakers, please do everyone a big favor.  Quit attacking people of other faiths.  Spend your time explaining your own faith.  And then…please explain the eternal consequences of laws that will reflect your own piety.

Your faith matters, too, if you expect us to vote for you.  Make no mistake about it.  America is governed by faith.  It always has been…and it always will be.

October 29, 2004:  Food for the Brain

A little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.                                                                                                     –Sir Francis Bacon

Defending the Indefensible

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

April 4, 2005

Tina’s small table was inconspicuous in the back of the conference room.  Filled with brochures, posters and business cards, she was looking forward to sharing information about her abstinence program.

But, at the end of the day, packing to go home, she shared her frustration with me.  Here she was at a conference dedicated to problems caused by teen sex.  It had seemed reasonable to think that nurses and teachers would want her information.  Instead…she spent the entire day defending herself and the notion that teens could and should remain sexually abstinent until marriage.

At every turn, sexual restraint and abstinence are being challenged.  The Department of Health and Human Services has just launched a new website that helps parents promote abstinence to their children as “the healthiest choice.”  We should be thankful.  Instead the director of HHS must defend himself against attacks from the ACLU and gay rights groups.

On today’s news, reporters discuss candidates under consideration as the new Catholic pope.  They point out that some people are enthusiastically hoping for a pope who will “modernize the church”…a pope who will withdraw opposition to abortion, birth control, premarital sex, and divorce.  In essence, from his place in heaven, Pope John Paul II, must defend himself.

This week, an uncommon convergence of news stories gives shape to an ethic that has come to dominate our land.  America’s heart can be best be known by making a list of the beliefs and behaviors we oppose, by cataloging the great offenses that make us angry.

Maybe, instead of rejecting sexual abstinence, gay activists could speak out in loud and clear voices…not to mention angry and indignant voices…opposing individuals and organizations such as NAMBLA who advocate adult-child sex.  What a wonderful sight it would be to see a sit-in of gay leaders blocking access to bookstores that sell the two-volume book set, Loving Boys.

Or…when is the National Organization for Women going to take on the media and demand a return to respect for women…real respect?  Why did NOW pass up the chance to give a good tongue-lashing to NBC, Terrell and Nicolette over the prime-time striptease on Monday Night Football?  If anyone should defend himself, why not start with Commissioner Paul Tagliabue?

Where are the class action attorneys when you really need them?  No matter how much “protection” Planned Parenthood educators promise with a condom, there is no denying that the unacceptable incidence of genital herpes infections – accurately labeled an epidemic by experts – is due to the failure of condoms to protect.  Where is the attorney to represent the thousands of students betrayed by educators who labeled condoms “safe sex”?

What about journalists wedded to promotional packets put out by the ACLU, NARAL and Planned Parenthood, reporters who do not take the time to educate themselves and write about the basics of sexually transmitted diseases and fetal development?  Shouldn’t they have to offer a defense of their news stories filled with inaccuracies and bias for the sake of advancing the politics of these organizations?

The ACLU has a long history of spending millions supposedly to oppose injustice and defend our rights.  Maybe they could defend the right of helpless pre-born babies to make it through the birth canal in one whole piece, living and breathing as they were created to be.  Isn’t this a choice worth defending, the choice to be born alive?

And at the top of the defenseless mob are the judges who pass themselves off as arbiters of justice and sound reasoning.  Is there any serious person in America, much less a Supreme Court Justice, who can truly defend the notion that we are unable to determine the moment when life begins?

Defending the indefensible is big business in America.  We have an intricate set of laws, complete with elections, judges, courts and attorneys.  But it will all come to naught unless we can fix what is truly wrong with us…the list of things that make us angry…and those that don’t.

July 2, 2004:  Abused by Freedom

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.                –Confucius