CoB Supports Comprehensive Sex Education

Unitarian Universalist Reverend Debra Haffner’s Religious Institute is leading national advocacy for comprehensive sex education (i.e. not just teaching abstinence until marriage and plugging our ears when we hear that young people aren’t following our advice). She is circulating the following petition to be presented to the US Congress hearing about domestic sex education, held on April 23 . If you wish to sign on, email your name, clergy title, and affiliation/organization, city/state by April 21 to haffner at religiousinstitute.org.

Even if this doesn’t catch your interest otherwise, we’re excited that the Church of the Brethren warrants specific mention as one of the leading denominations in the move for reality-based education for our youth – see the second to last paragraph.

Statement on the Public Health and Ethical Concerns with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs and the Need for Comprehensive Sexuality Education
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Submitted for the Record
April 23, 2008

The Committee will hear from many organizations the strong public health arguments that support sexuality education and oppose abstinence-only-until marriage programs. As religious leaders, we ask you to also consider the moral and ethical foundations for supporting comprehensive sexuality education for the nation’s youth.

As religious leaders, we believe young people should learn about their sexuality from their parents, faith communities, and school-based programs, not primarily from their peers or the entertainment media. We believe that programs must be age-appropriate, medically accurate, and truthful.

Young people need help in order to develop their capacity for moral discernment and a freely informed conscience. Education that respects and empowers young people has more integrity than many of the currently funded abstinence-only programs that are based on incomplete information, fear, and shame. Programs that teach abstinence exclusively and withhold information about pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention fail too many of our young people.

Our sacred texts and theological commitments call us to truth telling. Young people need to know that “there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing” but they also require the skills to make moral and healthy decisions about relationships for themselves now and in the future. We call on you to support comprehensive sexuality education programs that honor the diversity of religious and moral values in the community. Such education teaches that decisions about sexual behaviors should be based on moral and ethical values, as well as considerations of physical and emotional health. It affirms the goodness of sexuality while acknowledging its risk, consequences and dangers, and it introduces with respect the differing sides of controversial issues. It includes information about abstinence, contraception, and STD prevention. There is an urgent need for a federal sexuality education program that reaches all young people, regardless of income, class, ethnicity, or sexual experience or orientation.

For more than 40 years, mainstream faith based traditions have called for federal and local support for sexuality education. In 1968, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Synagogue Council of America, and the United States Catholic Conference issued a joint call for churches and synagogues to become actively involved in sexuality education within their congregations and their communities. Today, more than 13 denominations have policies supporting sexuality education in their schools, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Church of the Brethren.

It is time for the federal government to support comprehensive sexuality education programs for youth and to cease funding programs that are not only ineffective but may put our children and teenagers at risk – for disease, for short changed futures, for denial of the gift of their sexuality. It is time to provide all our young people with accurate education that respects the diversity of values in a community. It is indeed a time to speak and a time to act. May our religious voices help you understand that it is also the only moral response.