Why Not Tell Teen-Agers to Avoid Premarital Sex?

The driver of the car picking me up at the airport for my first visit to California this year tells me to be sure to fasten my seat belt. A new mandatory seat belt law took effect in January and the state wants to make sure that I am protected, whether I want to be or not.

It is one of a growing list of laws, rules and regulations that attempt to force us to conform to what is considered to be a practice we too might consider wise, had we the omnipotence of government authorities. The list includes age limits for consuming alcoholic beverages, driving automobiles and attending certain movies. It encompasses contracts, speed limits, leaf burning and where carry-on baggage must be placed on airplanes.

Only in the area of sex does there remain a reticence to tell people what is best for them. It is not that we lack evidence that premature and ill-considered sexual encounters often bring consequences at least as serious, if not more so, than those the other laws are enacted to prevent. It is that we lack the will to suggest limits (other than rape) on what playwright Budd Schulberg once wrote is “the friendliest thing two people can do.”

Perhaps we fear being labeled “puritanical,” though the Puritans seemed to have fewer problems than their descendants, particularly in the area of what used to be called “illicit sex.”

A decade ago, the anti-ERA leader, Phyllis Schlafly, was roundly booed and vilified when she told campus audiences that the best contraceptive, indeed the best guarantee against venereal disease, was a simple formula: one man, one woman for one lifetime.

Not as many laugh at such a formula today, in part because of the serious consequences of sex outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage, and in part because those who mock puritanism have failed to come up with a better formula.

In nearly every other area of human life there is a preference for applying formulas that help us to avoid problems. Only in the area of humanity’s most powerful and personal emotion--the sex drive--does our society actually encourage behavior that we know causes serious problems; then we attempt to find formulas to deal with the damage instead of its cause.

Why is this?

Perhaps the answer can be found in a newspaper ad for an automobile that the manufacturer hopes to persuade me to buy. The ad reads: “Fall in Love Without Paying the Price.” A better summation of contemporary attitudes about sex could not be found. It is a type of moral shoplifting.

We want the goods, but we don’t want to pay the price. Is it any wonder, then, that some women complain of a commitment crisis among the men they know?

When we are caught in our pursuit of pleasure without commitment, as in the case of out-of-wedlock pregnancies or venereal disease, we still do not acknowledge the existence of a standard to which we ought to conform. Rather, we ask that our failure to adhere to such a standard be overlooked in favor of an abortion or a vaccine so that we might continue as before.

In California, as in other states, police officers will hand out a ticket for failure to conform to the mandatory seat belt law. It is too much to expect (and impossible to enforce) that tickets be handed to persons engaging in sex outside of marriage, but it does occur to me that there could, as a starting point, be a mandatory curriculum in the schools to counteract the drumbeat of sensuality that assaults the senses through the media.

Instead of taking an approach of exposing students to all of their sexual options, as if all are equal and none is to be preferred, what would be wrong with forcefully telling them not to engage in sex until marriage and warning of the consequences if they do?

Not possible, they will do it anyway? Not necessarily. No law, including the law requiring that seat belts be worn, ensures universal compliance. Laws are designed to set a minimum standard of expectation. That is what is missing in the sex equation. It is such a standard that would again delineate between freedom and license.

Arriving back in Washington, I noticed a large ad displayed in the baggage claim area. It read: “125,000 junior high students flunked this simple test last year.” The ad is for a home pregnancy test kit. If so many are flunking the test, perhaps they need a tutor in self-control instead of a pregnancy test kit or the increasingly popular birth control clinic on the school grounds.

After all, if they can be taught by the cultural drumbeat to engage in premature sex, why can’t they be taught by a different drummer to abstain for now?