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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Everybody gets what they want here: liberals get the fact-based learning about sex and contraception and conservatives get the abstinence-only perspective.

Let me try to make the case that this isn't really getting to the heart of the matter and why these issues are difficult.

One, imagine that schools had a strictly materialist class about the proper ways to season and cook your dead pets and dead relatives to eat them, in times of war or famine or plane crashes in the Andes or even just economic depression. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper ways to use sex workers or to even perform as one yourself in a healthy way, if you happen to come from a moral culture that sees that as being reasonable. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the proper care and upkeep of your slaves to ensure they had good diet and exercise to perform their slaving duties effectively. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the most efficient way to operate a factory farm. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the healthiest ways to engage in sexual gratification with minors. Or imagine you had a class, from a strictly materialist perspective, about the current state of human biodiversity in different populations, and the appropriate ways to take advantage of those biological facts in constructing a functional society.

In each case, these classes would be controversial, regardless of whether the material was actually accurate and useful, because the move to a strictly materialist frame is already putting the activity in question into a category that some people would intensely disagree about in a metaphysical way. And just so with sex ed. Traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about abortion is downstream from traditionalists disagreeing with progressives about what sex IS, in some profound existential / spiritual sense, and, for that matter, what humans and families and mortality all are... just as in my hypothetical, the other classes would be offensive because they make assumptions about what a dead relative is, what so called "sex work" is (which is the entire point of the rebranding), what slavery is, and so on.

And two, the actual history of the 20th century and progressives championing of Sex Ed and abortion and planned parenthood and contraception and all the rest has had a significant undercurrent of them trying (from what they see as a civically responsible perspective) to get a bunch of other demographics to get their fertility rates under control... which has, of course, totally worked. It absolutely hasn't been just been some disinterested attempt to share some really interesting facts that they learned. You really don't have to read around much in history to see that this is true. I'm not even going to argue the morality or wisdom of this here; I'm just saying there is a history here. I'm also not saying that many people haven't also become convinced of the moral neutrality of a great deal of sexual stuff, or a bunch of the individual rights aspects of sexual liberation or whatever, either. But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics. And because of that history, there's no way to talk about "Hey, so, what about Sex Ed?" without it raising a bunch of controversy, especially with groups that have been on the receiving end of this all. It already absolutely hasn't been used in a neutral way.

Less of this, please.

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