State Film to Promote Chastity

With abhorrence, I read your editorial (July 23), “Be Serious,” particularly the line implying that education regarding chastity in young people allows them to ignore their sexuality.

This perception is faulty.

Promoting chastity is not ignoring sex or one’s sexuality.

Promoting chastity is recognizing sex as a basic need of the human being because chastity would have no need of being promoted if there was no sexuality.

Promoting chastity is emphasizing that one’s sexuality be kept in control until it can be satisfied in a loving, responsive relationship.

Promoting chastity is the only safe and sane way to insure that the young teen-ager will have adequate knowledge of his/her own sexuality. Learning by doing is often a costly price to pay.

You confuse one’s sexuality with one’s sexual activity. Since when are the two synonymous with healthy living? The former, as with all human activity, necessitates responsibility, for we are, at least, rational animals; taking the freedom to be overtly sexually active before one can make right judgments often leads to being totally unprepared for emotional consequences.

Promoting chastity is the most reasonable, adult way to promote teen-age responsibility and a growing maturity to self-actualization, the ultimate goal of the growth of the self.

It is legitimate; and it is serious.

F.A. CONNELLY

Somis