After reading a front page piece last week in another local paper, I wrote the following as the weekly religion column in today's edition of The Malone Telegram.
Recently, Public Health made a presentation to the County
Legislature on the topic of teen pregnancy. (The percentage of births from unplanned pregnancies in
Franklin Country is higher than that in surrounding counties and the state
average.) The subject at hand got
my attention, of course—but more on that later. What really caught my eye was that one of our legislators asked
if Public Health anticipated any “backlash” or “resistance from religious
groups.”
A couple of thoughts immediately crossed my mind.
First, I began to wonder if the reactions of people of faith
to matters of common concern in American life have grown so sharp, so shrill,
in recent years that we’ve caused ourselves to be considered little more than a
loud nuisance or an outright obstacle to solving social problems. If that is indeed the case, then shame
on us. We’ve shot ourselves in the
foot. We’ve forfeited our place in
the public square.
But then I also began to wonder if faith-based voices
weren’t just being hastily discounted as old-fashioned or unenlightened. That, too, would be quite a shame. I can’t speak for anyone else’s
religious tradition, but the Catholic Church has just shy of 2,000 years of
experience under it’s belt when it comes to promoting moral standards—a guide
for living upon which entire societies and noble cultures have been built. Sure, we haven’t always gotten it right,
but an honest look at history will show that we’ve had many more successes than
failures. (It’s particularly
ironic that such insights could be tossed aside as irrelevant or ill informed
in an age when “tolerance” is our highest value.)
I suspect the truth of the matter, however, is a bit of
both.
When Public Health presented its plan to the Legislature for
addressing teen pregnancy, a prime motivation given was a financial one: that
reducing pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases would save Franklin
County money. Providing our young
people with condoms and information via Facebook were essentially proposed as cost-cutting
measures.
What troubles me here is the failure to see people as
people, rather than as problems.
You don’t “fix” people the way you fix a broken budget. You educate people—and not just in the
mechanics of their reproductive systems, but in the far more wondrous workings
of the human spirit. And you
ennoble people, helping them to recognize their innate dignity. None of these problems will go away as
long as we let stand the commonly accepted notion that sex can be a recreational
activity free of any conequences, rather than a truly human act with deep
meaning and purpose. Facebook
pages and free condoms may appear to address a few of the unhappy symptoms we
can all recognize, but they can never get to the heart of what’s really gone wrong.
You might be thinking, “But that’s not the role of a
government agency!” And I’d say
that you’re precisely right. Yet
there are experienced experts in this field, and we’re already right here in
the community.
We’re all in this
together. Give us a chance to
contribute. We’ll try not to
shout.
When the video opened with the shot of the bar and cowboy boots, I had an immediate negative reaction. I have abstained from alcohol all my life and I don’t generally socialize with drinkers, certainly not in bars. This is a good ole boy with a southern drawl, baseball hat, shotgun in the back of his beat-up pickup (with a Confederate flag in the back window), and poor grammar. Doesn’t go to church; smokes, doesn’t pray; doesn’t spend time out in nature communing with God. Voted for Romney or (worse) didn’t bother to vote at all. Doesn’t care about the environment. Not my kind of person.
