A Review by Mothers’ Watch
Summer 2004 Newsletter Chastity Program
Sex, Love and Relationships by Sex Educator
Pam Stenzel
With all the filthy programs the Bishops have foisted on our children these many years; parents, in desperation, turn to “chastity” educators. A raft of chastity educators have come on the scene with videos and curricula. Among these educators, being embraced by Protestants and Catholics alike, is Pam Stenzel.
Mothers’ Watch moms believe that for the most part, their intentions may be basically good, because they are not trying to subtly seduce youth into sexual activity, promote homosexuality as a lifestyle, as most sex abuse, AIDS education and even some “abstinence” programs do. But the “don’t do it, you might get hurt, so wait” message is too superficial in a world where teens find excitement living on the edge.
Planned Parenthood was the inventor of classroom sex education. All programs by any name, follow not only the Planned Parenthood model – sexual information in varying degrees – but also the method, which uses an emotional approach and values clarification techniques. Sex educators are required to have a certain “comfort” level so they can talk easily about sex. As a result, all sex educators presentations come across as very crude, including Stenzel’s.
Chastity programs by any name (abstinence/fertility awareness) are compromise programs that legitimize all forms of classroom sex education including the Bishop’s diabolically anti-family, pornographic child abuse prevention programs in Catholic classrooms across the nation. (See Mothers’ Watch issues, Fall 2003, “How Dare You, Bishops!;” Spring 2004,” Your Excellency’s Elixir;” and the “Lures Program” in this Summer 2004 issue.)
Pam Stenzel’s curriculum, Sex, Love and Relationships, consists of two videos, which contain four different sessions and a Leader’s Guidebook. The videos were taped in Santa Monica Catholic school and are being marketed by Ignatius Press, but that does not make them Catholic. Ignatius Press has been promoting chastity programs for many years; having published Coleen Kelly Mast’s Love and Life Program, the “Catholic version” of Sex Respect. One wonders if Ignatius Press has to publish sex programs to keep the Bishops happy.
The video set is dressed up with greenery to give a non-religious look. Mrs. Stenzel’s presentations are that of a proselytizing evangelical Protestant. Her “religious” approach is far-removed from Catholic teaching and for that reason alone, would not be proper in a Catholic school. Pope Pius XI says:
“For the mere fact that a school gives some religious instruction (often extremely stinted), does not bring it into accord with the rights of the Church and of the Christian family, or make it a fit place for Catholic students”
Christian Education of Youth, p. 43
At the time the videos were made (1998), Mrs. Stenzel, a mother of three young children, stated that she had been a counselor at pregnancy centers for nine years in Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, and that she had been speaking to youth for four years.
Sex educators seem to have a need to tell their audience about how important sex is to them personally. Remarking on the difficulty of remaining chaste, Stenzel says after one is married, being chaste is still difficult because her talk circuit keeps her away from home 14 days a month.
The fact that Stenzel warns that STDs have reached epidemic proportions is not the most important message students need to hear. Neither is the message, “Keep your pants on!” which Mrs. Stenzel emphasizes as she mimics the whining youth response, “I didn’t think it would happen to me-e-e-e.”
Tragically, Catholic youth are taught, just as public school students, to think that everything in their lives is a “personal” choice, that absolutes from a Higher Authority, God, are just part of their personal choice selection. From the time most children enter school, they are being taught to depend on their feelings. If it “feels” right, then it’s the right choice. Although she uses some Biblical quotes and Jesus talk, Pam Stenzel still spins in the same “choice” rut in her presentation. She says she cannot make the choice for the students, telling them they have “choices,” and informing students of consequences in the hope they will then know to make the “right choice.” She emphasizes the negative in the hopes it will produce a positive response.
Stenzel uses quotes from the Bible, yet never discusses the Commandments beyond talking about “rules.” She never says that if we want to follow the teachings of Christ that these teachings “command” obedience. When one goes against God’s commands, it is “sin” and not just a bad “choice.” While Stenzel does use the word “sin,” the context is very lacking.
Catholics should be taught that mortal sin offends God and requires one to contritely and humbly approach the Sacrament of Confession, receive absolution, do penance with a firm attempt to sin no more. However, Stenzel’s response to sin is a simplistic, “Accept Jesus as your Savior.” She teaches that totally Protestant belief that because Jesus already died on the Cross for your sin, His blood covers your sin, so all you do is ask Him to forgive you and, “He will throw your sins as far as the East is from the West.”
Pam Stenzel plays upon the emotions of her audience using “very personal” anecdotes and comments about her own life throughout her presentations. In fact, Stenzel’s “sharing” becomes too much to be believable. This is part of that values clarification methodology of “sharing” and thinking that one must identify with one’s audience and be on their level so as not to come across as too authoritarian.
Stenzel’s Curriculum
Stenzel’s program consists of two tapes with four different sessions and one book, the “Leader’s Guide” with Student Handouts.
Session One – Physical Consequences
The first tape program titled, “Physical Consequences” is about the consequences of sexual activity, teen pregnancy and STDs.
Stenzel begins by telling the youth that at a previous talk, one of the students came up to her and said, “If I would have known what would happen to me, I would have made a different choice. Nobody told me-ee.” Stenzel tell her audience, “Today you are going to be told you have a choice. I can’t make this choice for you.
Stenzel immediately jumps into the “how good sex is” routine but with an added damper as she says: “God created sex. It’s awesome. It’s a great thing. God wants you to have awesome sex. But God created sex with boundaries . . . Fire has to have boundaries. In the fireplace it is good, but not in the middle of the living room floor. That’s not positive, it could burn the house down. The boundary God created sex for is a permanent lifetime commitment – marriage – “But we love each other!” “God didn’t create sex for love. God created sex for one context, a permanent lifetime commitment – marriage not love . . . Sometimes in marriage there’s love. Sometimes there isn’t. Marriage is not an exciting, heart pounding, one big long date. Look at your parents.”
Mothers Watch moms want you to take notice of the subtle parental put-downs and that babies, for which God ordained the conjugal act, are not even mentioned in that context. The negative tone is already very evident. Stenzel seems to equate love with lust as she says, “sex is awesome; God wants you to have awesome sex.” A more positive presentation would be that babies are awesome, but she is not positive about that either.
Stenzel continues: “If you have sex outside of marriage you are going to pay. You can’t walk away. There is a cost. You give everything you are – physically, emotionally, spiritually . . . Teens’ biggest fear is pregnancy. They don’t think about disease … Pregnancy is survivable … Teens have a four times greater chance of disease than pregnancy.”
“Abortion is painful . . .” Mothers’ Watch moms would like to say that Stenzel talks about abortion being painful for the teen mother, but what about the baby that is being cut into little pieces? That’s the reality.
An upset tenth grade girl told Mrs. Stenzel that her mom dragged her to an abortion clinic. (Note that the mother of the teen is the bad guy.) Incredibly, Stenzel tells the girl, “Jesus died for you and there is no sin. There is nothing you can do that His blood won’t cover if you’ll ask Him to forgive you. My Bible says He throws your sin as far as East is from West. Then she adds that “the girl asked God to forgive her and I believe He did that.” (Note the strong Protestant influence with emphasis on a personal Bible (My Bib1e) and a personal interpretation.)
In typical Planned style, Stenzel’s includes her list “Consequences of Girls having a baby in their teens.” Mothers Watch sees this “consequence” list as dangerous. Suppose one of the girls in those classes was pregnant or was to become pregnant in the future. Would she see abortion as an easy way out rather than risk such consequences?
The consequences:
• 8 out of 10 will live below poverty level for 10 years – most, the rest of their lives.
• 9 out of 10 will not go to or graduate college.
• The number one indicator of poverty is a single parent household where the mother was underage when she began parenting.
• 30 billion dollar cost to taxpayers
Stenzel now addresses the boys in the class: “If a boy gets a girl pregnant, the law in all 50 states is that he will not he able to walk away. The Social Security number of both parents is required on the birth certificate. Over a period of 18 years, it will cost $60 to $80 thousand dollars in child support and your pay will be garnished.” What will the boys think who are in the audience, perhaps that it would be cheaper to pay for an abortion than 18 years of child support?
Stenzel claims that a senior boy in a high school class she was addressing said that he is paying $350 dollars a month child support and he works at Burger King. His excuse was that he ended up in this predicament because he had gotten drunk and that he wouldn’t have made the same decision to have sex if he had been sober. His advice to other teens was,”Don’t drink.” Mothers’ Watch moms says this fellow better stop more than drinking, because drinking did not make the girl pregnant. One could easily question, did the fellow blame drinking for his sexual activity or perhaps, for his failure to use a condom.
Planned Parenthood-trained speakers often tell a heart-wrenching story about themselves to gain sympathy and a connection with the audience. Stenzel tells the very personal and emotional story that her biological father was a rapist. (How does she know that with enough surety to make that accusation?) She does not know her mother, and was raised by adoptive parents. She said, “I didn’t deserve the death penalty because of the crime of my father. Every child is wanted and planned – I believe in God’s mercy and that He has a plan for me. She said my mother loved me enough to give me my life and I am so grateful that she gave me my family.
She says that adoption is an act of love, not without pain. It takes courage to say “I want what’ s best for you and I’m not it.” Mrs. Stenzel tells her audience that in the last six years two million wanted to adopt. The numbers are high mainly because there was a 500% rise in infertility. Stenzel went on to describe how STDs cause infertility in women.
STDs
Talking like a health clinician, Pam Stenzel goes into the dangers of STDs in young people and bluntly states, that if they have had sex, they must be tested for sexually transmitted disease. “Pregnancy, is not a disease, it only takes nine months. I can walk you through that,” she says. But she warns youth with the bad truth that sexually transmitted diseases can last a lifetime or cause death and tells the youth that if they have engaged in any sexual activity they need to be tested.
Stenzel says, “The best choice is before you have sex because 12,000 teens a day will contract an STD. In 1950, five STDs were known. Today there are over 50. 25% per cent of these are most prevalent among teens and of that number, 37% are absolutely incurable. You’ve got it for life.”
Stenzel warns that Chlamydia is a bacteria. It has no symptoms, but your reproductive organs are scarred for life. If you knew you had it, it could be cured. Have it once, 25% chance of never getting pregnant; have it twice and there s a 50% chance you will be infertile. It is a major cause of pelvic inflammatory disease. Stenzel tells the girls that they “have an open system, easy to infect. His (your boyfriend) is closed. Girls are more complicated easier to damage on a permanent basis.”
She continues. HPV or Human Papillomavirus is the most prevalent and can carry and transmit genital warts which may, or may not, be visible, Genital warts are the number one cause of cancer of the cervix and more women died of cancer in 1995 from this illness than died of AIDS. 46% percent of all sexually active singles with skin contact anywhere in the genital area are already infected and can infect others. Everyone thinks that they can do all this stuff as long as they don’t get pregnant and still be “technically” a virgin. (She does not elaborate on the meaning of “stuff.”)
Stenzel spoke briefly on HIV because she said there was already a lot of information on the subject. However, she said that even when you are tested, in 4 to 6 % of the cases, it sometimes takes as long as three years to show up. Of teens who use condoms, she says, 1 in 5 are pregnant in 18 months emphasizing the failure of condoms to protect against disease. She says there is a 10 – 30% failure rate regarding pregnancy and the sperm is 450 times larger than the HIV virus.
Stenzel talks were punctuated throughout with typical student responses that included: “Nobody to-oold me this.” or “‘It’s not going to happen to mee-ee.” She then says, “If they can’t see, feel, or touch it, they think they don’t have it.” Stenzel asks students, “Want a line? Absolutely no genital contact of any kind. Keep your pants on!”
She tells teens that for those who are sexually active, that before they get married they will have to rehash their past and tell each other whether they currently have, or previoulsy had, any STDs.
Stenzel claims that kids want to know how far is too far. “They want a line drawn so they can go over it. Cross the line and you need to be tested for STDs. Stenzel stupidly condenses God’s law into her simple Rule: “Keep your pants on.” Such advice would not deterred Clinton and Monica.
If the Catholic children at that school had any religious training, they would not need to ask, “How far is too far?” Through their Faith, they would not have known to avoid the near occasions of sin.
Pam Stenzel and every other sex educator fail to give young people God’s truth. Young people have no concept of the depth of sin or why engaging in sexual activity is so very wrong. Young people do not know how seriously they offend God and make a mockery of His intellect and will when they gamble with the very act that God made to continue His creation, the blessings of children. This is not some minor detail too unimportant to mention. It is the very reason for our being. In order for life to make sense, youth need to learn about the teachings of Christ and His Church, about our duty to continue God’s creation, and see babies as blessings.
Session Two
Emotional Consequences
Pam Stenzel begins this tape with the question. “Even if a contraceptive was developed that was 100% effective against pregnancy and disease, are there other reasons to wait?” She responds,” I am stupid enough to think so. Sex is more than a biological act, a hormone you can’t control, an itch you got to scratch.” She says that it involves more than the body, it involves you and she quotes 1 Corinthians 6:18 saying one must flee sexual immorality, run in the other direction, because all other sins are outside the body but sexual sins are against your own body.
Talking to the students regarding those that are sexually active, she says if you want to know if the guy loves you, stop having sex and see what’s left. She says anyone can say “yes,” but it takes integrity and self respect to say “no.”
Stenzel says she hopes the students who were in the school or Confirmation class where this talk took place, will go home and talk to their parents about what they learned regarding sex, “after you pick them (parents) up off the floor and make sure they are breathing.”
Mothers’ Watch moms see this comment as the prevalent sex educator attitude, that of portraying parents as too dumb or too afraid to deal with the subject. It is very typical of sex educators. For someone who is supposed to be helping teens, making parents look bad is no way to help. However, it does reveal a sex educator mentality that fails to recognize that intimate discussions about sex do not belong in a classroom. When discussing the conjugal mystery, parents who are hesitant and uneasy help to impart the delicateness of such mystery. Children understand that. Stenzel and sex educators do not.
Stenzel does discourage dating at a young age and encourages group dating. She also discourages girls and guys “becoming super-glued together like to ticks sucking each other dry.”
Stenzel says part of dating time should be spent with each other’s families so youth will understand the family system both persons came from. See how the guy treats his mom and realize that. When you marry, you also marry the family. She told young people to think of the person they are dating as someone’s daughter or son whom they have invested their life.
She talked about pairing up with a best friend in order to help one another through the teen years – to rein in each other.
Stenzel’s advice is so shallow. How desperately youth need to know their Faith and need to know to avoid occasions of sin. They need to practice custody of the eyes and ears, and need to understand the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. They need to understand that God commands obedience, and that because of sin, Christ was nailed to the Cross. They need to understand the Sacrament of Confession.
Instead of having a speaker sharing her personal life history, students need to hear about the courageous saints who faced down challenges against purity. What better role model than the Holy Family or better weapon than the Holy Rosary.
Session Three
Spiritual Consequences
Pam Stenzel mentions God’s love, obedience, God’s law, temptation and forgiveness – which sound very good. And it would be good, if it weren’t so void of Catholicism and so full of Protestantism. This is not to say one needs to be spewing fire and brimstone, but what it shows is that the chastity educators’ “don’t do it” message fills our youth. If fails because modesty and purity demand that there are certain things that one should not be talking about in public.
Sin can be talked about in the context of Original Sin and God’s Commandments and readily understood without a lot of detail or personal stories. If one wants to teach someone not to kill, few would hesitate to bring up God’s Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not kill.” But in discussing killing, who in their right mind would elaborate on how people are tempted to kill? However, when it comes to matters of sex, Pam Stenzel spends most of her presentation telling youth how tempting it is to be sexually active. She relates her examples to Adam and Eve in the Bible but it’s a shallow “Don’t do it!” message.
While she gives reference to “God’s Law,” she fails to say it is a sin against the Sixth Commandment and offensive to God. Her emphasis regarding God is that of simply a loving and forgiving God. Does she not know that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom?
Stenzel begins her long interpretation of religion. She foolishly says that as a child, “I used to believe that God got bored one day and made up a bunch of rules to make my life miserable. God’s job was to make a bunch of rules and if you crossed the line, fry you. God’s not like that.” She then sings a song from her childhood: “Oh, be careful little eyes what you see…because the Father up above is looking down on you in love.” She went on to say that she didn’t think that God “looked down with love,” but that she thought it was a lightning bolt. She didn’t hear the word “love.”
She talked about her version of Adam and Eve in the garden. She says that God provided all for them because of His love for them, except for the one tree. They were told, “Don’t eat that.” Stenzel is equating the temptation and fall with pre-marital sex as she talks about the forbidden tree saying, “See this awesome great thing. You can’t have that. I gave you everything that’s life giving, but this one tree is a lie. It looks like life and it smells good, but it is not going to give life, it’s going to bring death.”
Stenzel’s version is not only wacky but also misleading for those whose background in the Faith is lacking. She goes on to say that Satan came in the form of a serpent to Eve first, and that his first lie to Eve was asking her, “Did God really say you couldn’t have that? Did God really say you couldn’t have sex till you are married?” Then Stenzel raising her voice, says, “God’s law is simple, if you’re married have sex. If you’re not married don’t do it. If you are going to get married Saturday, you’re not married on Friday. When you’re married, have at it!”
The serpent’s second lie to Eve was, “God’s holding out on you. He wants to wreck your fun.” Adam and Eve decided, “I can do it my way.” They ate that apple, then sin came, shame came and their first response was to run from God. Then Stenzel goes on to say that God hunted them down and that when we fail that God hunts us down. “If you are a child of God, God hunts you dawn!”
Taking the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible and relating it to sex is a blatant misinterpretation. In Genesis, Satan tempted Adam and Eve telling them that eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would make them like God. Furthermore, Stenzel should not short-sell God. She should know that God is omnipotent and All Knowing and does not have to “hunt you down.”
Stenzel says when there is a question of “should I?”, she teaches teaches her children two things. First, “What does the Bible say?” It is clear that Stenzel and those of the Protestant mindset can make the Bible say anything they want as demonstrated above. To tell a child to look through the Bible that contains several hundred pages is rather a tall order.
Why wouldn’t Stenzel say, “What does God’s Commandments say about that?” It makes a lot more sense. They are the simple rules of behavior found in the Bible. There are only Ten Commandments and they are very easy to teach, easy to memorize and easy for anyone to understand. Furthermore, as someone said, “There are only Ten Commandments one has to obey, everything else is okay.”
Stenzel’s second answer to “Should I?” that she gives her children is, “What would Jesus do?” This is the new slogan of evangelical Protestant youth who wear bracelets with the acronym WWJD. Catholic youth do not need Protestant evangelizing. Catholics have Jesus as the Head of His Church. Jesus founded the Church and Magisterium as the Supreme Authority to continue His work. The Bible, as we know it, was assembled into the Bible we know today by Catholic Bishops in 393 A.D at the Council of Hippo.
Speaking to those who may have sinned, Stenzel’s advice is very troubling. She says, “God already paid the price for you, freely giving you complete forgiveness.” This totally Protestant message comes across as if it could be a free ticket to sin. Catholics should be reminded that they need confession and penance and a firm intention to amend their lives in order to receive absolution from their sin.
Stenzel tell students that “There is freedom for you. Jesus went to the Cross to set you free. There was a time when I shook my fist at the holy God . . . I don’t need You. I don’t need your rules. I don’t need you to tell me how to live. In that moment I deserved death. But God loved Pam Stenzel so much that even when I shook my fist in His face and told Him I didn’t need to do it His way, He sent His Son to die for me, and I finally took my sin and said, Jesus I’m sorry. I haven’t trusted You. I did it my way. I want to say I’m sorry and I want you to forgive me.”
“He took my sin and threw it as far as the East is from the West. He did something more than that for me. What Christ did on the Cross is better than just wiping your sin away.” Stenzel says, “He credited the righteousness of Christ, the perfect sinlessness of Christ to me. When God looks at Pam Stenzel, He doesn’t see my sin. He doesn’t even see me. He sees the perfect sinlessness of Christ.” Stenzel then compares God’s righteousness with that if an unlimited credit card that He willingly credits to your account. Stenzel comes across as a Protestant preacher whose delivery is far softer on sin than the preachers of old. So lax is Stenzel towards sin that she omits the fact that God will judge us and that this earth is our trial period to determine where we will spend eternity. Stenzel ends the tape with the spontaneous Protestant-type prayer.
Session Four
Character Consequences
Stenzel describes “character” as being built with every choice you make. She begins by saying that a young man who wanted to remain chaste till marriage asked her, “If God didn’t want me to have sex till I was married, why is it so difficult?” Stenzel explains that every struggle has a purpose. She again mentions the Epistle of James who wrote during the time of persecutions, “Consider it pure joy when you face trials” (Ch. l: vs. 2).
Stenzel goes on to say that when you have to take 185,000 cold showers and it’s really tough, consider it joy, because James says that struggle brings perseverance. To be mature, testing brings growth.
A familiar sex educator technique is to praise youth and bring down parents. Stenzel says, “unbelievable great things come out of this generation. Students, across this nation, who are turning this country upside-down, are displaying maturity that I never had. And I know why, because they are under so much pressure, so much temptation and opportunity to cave, and those who don’t, and who hang in there, are pretty strong students.”
Stenzel recalled a trip she made to Alaska where the people were very unkind and unwelcoming. She felt like going back home, but God said to her, “No, I have something for you to do.” (Stenzel’s direct line to heaven is really a bit much!)
As with other chastity/sex educators, Pam Stenzel has not said anything positive about parents. She did not say who the hecklers were in the audience, except that they were parents. Young people not only need the truth; they need to be encouraged to listen to their parents, not to hear parents in a negative light. What of those 50 kids who went to her room? Were they acting in defiance of their parents? Was she leading them to think, “you don’t to listen to them? Listen to me instead. “I’m the expert.” This scenario is very troubling!
Stenzel then tells the story about when she was a teenager going to “parochial school” and being among a group who had been winners in a speech contest. They won a trip to Washington, D. C. Part of that trip included going to see a play which turned out to be full of foul language. She knew she shouldn’t stay because her mother had told her before she left that she was not there representing just herself, she was representing Jesus Christ. So after some inner conflict, she told her sponsor she had to leave, and she left the theater.
A boy in their group, who was an exchange student from Germany, called her when he got back to the hotel and they met in the lobby. He said he never met anyone willing to “walk what they talked.” The boy said to Stenzel, “I don’t know what you got, but I want it.” Stenzel said that he “accepted Christ as his Savior” right there in the lobby. He went back to Germany and joined an organization that distributed literature to youth in Africa, then went to seminary and is now pastor of a large Church in Germany.
This above scenario is an emotional Protestant evangelizing of Catholic school students. It was followed by a token reference to Mother Teresa, who she called “a woman of sacrifice who breathed Jesus in everything she did.”
She then asks the students to think of a time that they were in a position to take a stand and make a difference in someone else’s life. The students were instructed to bow their heads and close their eyes and get alone with God and then to ask themselves how they responded to that person.
Mrs. Stenzel finished with a spontaneous Protestant type prayer.
These are not films produced in a Protestant school, but at a Catholic school, Santa Monica Catholic School in Santa Monica, California. The film company, Gateway Films, gives credit to Msgr. Lloyd Torgerson and Father Jon Majarucon and the staff and students at the school.
As Mothers’ Watch has already pointed out in our previous newsletter, abstinence/chastity programs have become a big business and there is lots of outside money, taxpayer included, funding such programs. As a result chastity educators are selling their wares everywhere.
The Leader’s Guide and Student Handouts
In addition to, and used in conjunction with the videos, Pam Stenzel publishes the Leader’s Guidebook containing information and activities to accompany the videos.
To accompany the first session are nine pages of “Statistical Documentation” about all the STDs, AIDS and “Condom Efficiency” and the source of those statistics. There is also a page titled, “Getting Tested and Treated,” which is a note to teachers encouraging them to talk to students about being tested for STDs if they have been sexually active. Stenzel informs teachers that students who may need to be tested should tell their parents. However, if a student refuses to get the family involved, she tells the student they can go behind their parents’ backs and contact their county health department for free confidential testing. Then the county, or clinic, takes over the care of the youth, and the parents who need to know, will not know. Stenzel should know that this advice would be plugging youth into the public health system which freely dishes out birth control, including abortion.
Just as Patricia Miller’s In God’s lmage video program is a curriculum by the addition of Leader’s Guide materials, so too, Stenzel’s Leader’s Guide is used to turn her videos into a curriculum. The videos become the springboard for classroom interaction. As in all sex education, many of these activities and skits use the same old values clarification, or psychological game playing.
There are several games that the students are asked to perform that emphasize “consequences” of teen sexual activity. There is a STD game that consists of giving students 3×5 cards with names of the disease on a “select” number. The students interact with one another and each time one talks to someone who has an STD on their card, they note it on their own. This is actually mimicking students having STDs and passing diseases on to others.
The above game is followed by one titled, How Many Partners Have You Slept With? The activity directs the teacher to call on student volunteers to play the role of promiscuous teens who have contracted various types of STDs.
Another activity is the Open Ended Sentence values clarification strategy whereby the students break into small groups by gender and complete sentences about the opposite sex. They are even instructed to “respond RESPECTFULLY” to each other and should practice good communication skills by using phrases such as “I hear you saying ,… It sounds as if you are feeling, … I feel . . . when you … because …”
One Opening Activity Option is to make chocolate chip cookies using Tabasco sauce, extra salt and less sugar with a sign that says, “Do not eat.” and see who disobeys the sign.
Then there are those skits! In two of the skits, the students play the role of someone who has lost their virginity. One of the skits uses the infamous ‘Gift Box that can be found in just about every chastity program. The final skit is The Wedding Scene. In this skit, the bride and groom are at the altar and two girls from the groom’s past who he “had slept with” come up close to him at the ceremony and start talking to him. One of the girls admiring the ring, says to the other, ”’the only thing he ever gave me was herpes.” The other girl proudly announces that she was the one who gave him herpes and said, “It’s the gift that keeps on giving, you know.”
Pam Stenzel’s program just proves once again that sex education by any name is still sex education. These programs, like Planned Parenthood programs, start with the premise that youth have sexual cravings that must be addressed, that “sex is awesome,” and that “babies are consequences.” Stenzel says she gets a lot of positive feedback and no doubt she does. After all, she is not promoting homosexuality as an alternative life-style and birth control as needed. She seems very sincere in wanting to help youth. But how enduring is her message? It might emotionally stir the youth at the time, but then what?
The Truth found in Christ and His Church is enduring. It is what youth so desperately need. But Pam Stenzel and other sex educators arrogantly profess to know more than the parents do. Their approach is psychotherapeutic, not spiritual, and the little bit of Biblical quotes and God talk is terribly flawed and inaccurate, and goes against God-given parental rights.
The reason for the conjugal act is not a carnal response to lustful feelings, that one is supposed to choose to rein in until marriage. Through the conjugal act, male and female become co-creators with God. It is the means by which God ordained that human life be perpetrated. In Genesis 1:28 one reads, “And God blessed them saying, Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” Man and woman continue God’s creation following the order given by God to be fruitful and multiply. God’s first blessing upon man and woman is to have children. Babies are not consequences; they are God’s blessings!
There is nothing more wonderful than a newborn baby. A baby is a mystery of God’s creation manifest in the blessing of a tiny helpless child. Everyone needs to understand that every baby is a blessing of God. God reminded the world of this 2000 years ago when He sent his only Son to us as a helpless Baby.
Our youth, and most adults, need to go back to basics regarding human life. They need to understand life from the time of creation. Babies are God’s special blessings, and that act which brings about these living miracles is not one to be squandered on selfish pleasure. The first and most important step in bringing the carnal, lustful world we live in back to its senses, is teach God’s purpose as it was in the beginning. Chastity educators just can’t get that right!
