Schools Supplying Birth Control to 11 Year Olds

AP reports that the Portland School Committee voted 7-2 yesterday to make a full range of contraceptives available, including birth control pills, to middle school children as young as 11 years old.

Committee member Robert O'Brien (not one of the two dissenters, it seems) assures us that distribution would only follow "extensive counseling" and would not be given to prepubescent children. This is his notion of scrupulous moral responsibility as a public educator.

"Students would need parental permission to use the city-run health center in the school, but they wouldn't have to tell them they were seeking birth control." (AP)

Nancy Gibbs at TIME adds,

"Parents would have to consent for their children to be treated at the King Middle School clinic, but the nature of the treatment provided, including prescribing contraception, falls under state laws protecting patient privacy."

No doubt these schools are willing to discipline or counsel (as appropriate) any of these children on a range of behavioral issues, even bringing the parents into the process. But when children as young as 11 are having sexual intercourse, suddenly its a privacy issue. But an 11 year old is not making an adult choice when engaging in this adult behavior. He or she is being exploited and needs to be protected, not from his or her parents but from the sexual "partner." Those in charge of the Portland school system, however, think of themselves as "protecting" the children by supplying them with birth control and keeping the matter a secret from the parents.

Because you are surely wondering, here is the answer from AP: "Sex with a nonspousal minor under 14 is considered gross sexual assault in Maine, and officials said it was unclear whether nurses at the health center would be required to report such activities."

Advocates claim that they are simply facing reality:

"Five of the 134 students who visited King Middle School's health center last year admitted they were sexually active; in the last four years, Portland's three middle schools reported 17 pregnancies, not counting miscarriages or unreported pregnancies that ended in abortions." (TIME)

From this, writer Nancy Gibbs reasons that, "...while ideally parents should be responsible for transmitting information and values to their children, the school has a responsibility to children whose parents can't or won't do so." She takes it as axiomatic that government schools have a responsibility to become the parents of children whose actual parents appear to be deficient. There's one of the problems right there.

Further facts from TIME:

• "Roughly 30% of the country's 1,700 school health clinics offer some form of contraception, but condoms are far more common than prescription contraception."

• "Maine Middle schoolers, like kids all across the country, are already postponing sex longer: The percentage who reported having sexual intercourse dropped from 23% in 1997 to 13% in 2005, according to the Maine Youth Risk Behavior Survey."

Again I ask: Why do people continue to send their children to government schools? You do this even knowing that, should your child enter into moral confusion, the school will facilitate it by supplying birth control without your knowledge, even birth control pills which (for good medical reason) are prescription drugs.

What does it take before the leaders in our nation -- from the school committees and town councils to the United States Congress -- and those who elect them see that a community cannot live this way and continue as a community in the proper sense of the world. These people have the same moral outlook that defended leniency for criminals and liberty for the insane while New York City was slipping into anarchy in the 1970s and 1980s. A people cannot adopt the moral premises that our cultural leaders defend and continue as a productive and civil people.

Parents of Portland! You know the seven who voted for this. Throw the bums out!

Meanwhile, consider this freak show of quotations:

Gov. John Baldacci said he had reservations about the program and was trying to learn more. (AP)

Carol Schiller, the mother of a boy and girl who graduated from King, said she was "elated" at the committee's vote. She said critics shocked that 11-year-olds have sex should "get over it." She added, "It's much more important that we reach out to these kids and get them the tools they need to stay safe, stay in school and get an education." (AP)

One committee member, Sarah Thompson, mother of an eighth grader, admitted that the proposal made her "uncomfortable," but she understood the need. "I know I've done my job as a parent," Thompson said. "[But there] may be a time when she doesn't feel comfortable coming to me [and] not all these kids have a strong parental advocate at home." (TIME)

December 14, 2007: AP supplied this correction in the comments. In light of this, Mrs Schiller's idea of "reaching out" to sexually active children is only slightly less appalling, but appalling just the same.

¶ PORTLAND, Maine (AP) _ In an Oct. 18 story about contraceptive prescriptions provided at King Middle School health clinic, The Associated Press quoted Carol Schiller, a mother, saying that critics who are shocked that 11-year-olds have sex "should get over it." Schiller now says she was referring to 14- and 15-year-old middle school students, rather than the youngest students at the school. The story should have specified the age range.

Harvard Prof: Multiculturalism Kills Community

Daniel Henninger reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal (“The Death of Diversity”) that the cultivation of diversity in the form of perpetually distinct ethnic communities “has a downside.” That is, “People in ethnically diverse settings don’t care about each other.”

That seems counter-intuitive.

He draws this conclusion from reading a study by Robert Putnam, public policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). He has just completed a study of the impact of diverse communities on social cohesion and civic engagement entitled E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century.

Henninger quotes Putnam’s scandalous conclusion:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

Growing up in Canada, I was taught that while America follows the “melting pot” approach to integrating immigrants into the nation (understood to be clearly bad), enlightened Canada welcomes her new arrivals into something we called a “salad bowl” (understood to be clearly good). The Trudeau government of the 1970s made this a matter of policy, calling it “multiculturalism,” their way of trying to diffuse the bi-cultural, bi-national Quebec problem.

I came to see the inherent contradiction in this. The goal was to form a tolerant society of diverse communities, each appreciating and respecting all the others. The celebration of this social model was the annual “Caravan” festival in Toronto, a delightful arrangement in which the various ethnic groups would put on shows, serve food and sell crafts at their respective restaurants and community centers. People would buy “passports” and circulate from one venue to another all week.

The problem is that the people hosting and the people circulating represent two very different views of the world and of neighboring worlds. The more appreciation for diversity one has, the less attached one becomes to one’s own culture. Perhaps it is a weak sense of having a culture at all that inclines a person to circulate rather than host at an event like Caravan. Of course this is a generalization, but English Canadians are notorious for their paralyzing confusion over who they are.

So diversity, in the sense of a confederation of distinct yet peacefully coexisting communities, a "community of communities" as I think Canadian Tory leader Joe Clark once put it, is something that can be cultivated only by people who care nothing for it, but instead care only for their own respective insular ways of life. They care nothing for other communities and nothing for the nation as a whole, except perhaps insofar as it pertains to protecting what is particular to them, if they think about it at all. There is no citizenship within this view, except in the merely legal sense, for that requires a sacrificial concern for the common good. There is only the opposite. This social model encourages retreat into concern for what is narrowly one’s own, though not as far as what de Tocqueville calls individualism. Love for everyone else’s cultures is held up as a virtue, but those cultures can perpetuate themselves only to the extent that there are people paying no attention to other people’s cultures and perhaps even rejecting them. This is what Putnam has documented. (It is interesting that we need expensive studies to prove what otherwise is quite obvious.)

The American model, the so-called “melting pot,” is not the oppressive enemy of human flourishing that some claim it to be. Indeed, it is the opposite. The “melting” indicates the virtue and necessity of conforming to what is “American.” The United States is the only country in the world that is founded on certain principles of right, truths held to be self-evident, namely “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus, a newly naturalized citizen, whether from Canada or Tonga, is as much an American as a descendant of Washington himself, provided that he supports the Constitution and the principles on which it is based. This model is most conducive of citizenship, or what Putnam calls “social cohesion and civic engagement.” It directs people to think more about “us” than about “me,” with what is good for “us” being informed by what is objectively known to be good through reflection on nature and nature's God.

Putnam goes even further than I would expect, however, in his characterizations of these insular communities. Notice, they "withdraw even from close friends, [and] expect the worst from their community and its leaders." The final picture is one of total alienation: they "huddle unhappily in front of the television." It sounds like a stultifying and miserable existence. This goes beyond even the individualism against which de Tocqueville cautions us, and descends into egoism. I don't recognize this, but his argument merits reading.

Especially interesting is the hope Putnam sees in "large evangelical congregations" which provide people of diverse ethnic backgrounds with lots of little groups (perhaps local Bible studies and fellowship evenings) in the context of a common identity and community experience. I would say that the church of Christ offers people the social body and personal identity for which they long, but which can be found only partially in gangs, families, neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves. See my earlier post on community and the longing soul.

For a good study of the present fixation on diversity by our cultural elites, Peter Wood's Diversity, the Invention of a Concept (2004) is the definitive word of the subject.

Sunday Reflection: Community and the Longing Soul

This morning, Pastor Benjamin Miller at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island, New York, said,

We long for a bond of human community that nothing can break (no one moves away, grows cold toward us, dies), in which each is eagerly pursuing the good of everyone with an infinite and gracious love. But that is found only in God the Father through Jesus Christ.

This brings to mind Augustine's prayer from the Confessions, "Father, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Aristotle's observation is true: we are "political animals." We were made for community. "No man is an island, sufficient unto himself," said Donne. But though made for community, we were not made for this world. What we long for in relationships, we cannot find in earthly, natural relationships.

The human bonds that sweeten our lives are blessings from God, but like all of his blessings they point beyond themselves to the One who alone truly satisfies. It is the failure to see this that in the modern world has led to utopian ideology and thence to monstrous tyranny. Mistaking the sign for the signified, seeking in this world what can be found fully only in the next, or in what transcends this world, is idolatry and leads necessarily to disappointment, misery and destruction.

With that in mind, the wisdom of the American system of government can be seen in its moderation. It secures for each citizen the freedom to pursue happiness, but does not guarantee that happiness. That is only God's to give.

Indeed, God has promised us that happiness. He has promised you that happiness. He gives you himself, and does so only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

To Israel he said, "I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish" (Jeremiah 31:25 ESV).

He fulfilled this promise in Jesus the Messiah, the hope of all nations: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).