Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Sat, 26 Dec 1992 16:29:00 EST
From:         Marty Helgesen <MNHCC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Subject:      A Christas Miracle? :)

I don't know if it qualifies as a Christmas miracle, but reality has
intruded onto the Op.Ed. page of the New York Times.  In the issue
for Saturday, December 26, there are two essays that affirm tradi-
tional moral values.

One is "Sex Is For Adults" by Ellen Hopkins, "a Rolling Stone con-
tributing editor".  It begins:

    Remember how drunken driving used to be kind of funny?  Or if not
    funny, inevitable, especially for the young.  When I was in high
    school (I'm 35) only losers worried about the alcoholic consump-
    tion of the person behind the wheel.  Fourteen years later, when
    my sister made her way through the same suburban high school,
    designated drivers had become the norm and only losers swerved
    off into the night.

    I was reminded of this remarkable evolution when I began to
    explore the idea that teaching abstinence to teen-agers need not
    be the province of right-wing crazies.  Could it be that teen-age
    sex is no more inevitable than we once thought teen-age drunken
    driving?  Is it possible to make a liberal, feminist argument for
    pushing abstinence in the schools?  I believe it is.


She goes on to explain why.  I am not going to copy the whole arti-
cle, but urge everyone interested in this question to read it.  I
will mention though, that she is openly scornful of what she calls
"the religious right".  Among the values of this article is that it
refutes the claim of some ACLU extremists that teaching chastity is a
violation of (all together now) THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
because it promotes a religious belief.

On the same page is an article "The Controversial Truth: Two-Parent
Families Are Better" by David  Popenoe, "associate dean for social
and behavioral sciences at Rutgers University" and "co-chairman of
the Council on Families in America, a research organization".  He
acknowledges that traditional, two-parent families can have problems
and are not always possible, but says:

    Yet in three decades of work as a social scientist, I know of few
    other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so deci-
    sively on one side of the issue: on the whole, for children, two-
    parent families are preferable to single-parent families and
    stepfamilies.

    If our prevailing views on family structure hinged solely on
    scholarly evidence, the current debate would never have arisen in
    the first place.

    But today, as in 1965, this debate hinges less on scholarly
    evidence than on cultural values.  <The essay begins with a
    discussion of relevant events in 1965.>


Libraries around the country, and in many other countries, subscribe
to the New York Times.  Most people reading this posting who want to
find a copy of those articles can do so.  They are worth reading, and
anyone who is involved in discussions of these issues may want to
copy and file them, or at least take notes.

Marty Helgesen
Bitnet: mnhcc@cunyvm   Internet: mnhcc@cunyvm.cuny.edu

"Experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive."
        --  C. S. Lewis
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