There is an ongoing epidemic in America these days, a self-destructive mindset which enshrines Belief as superior to Fact, considers Truth to be Inconvenient, and Reality as user-optional. It manifests in every aspect of life - and one of the biggest most fundamental matters this conspiracy of madness refuses to deal rationally with is
sex.
Thus we have Christianist fundamentalists fighting a vaccine that could reduce cervical cancer because it might encourage promiscuity, programs that fight AIDS deprived of funding because they mention condoms, women of child-bearing age being urged to regard themselves as 'potentially pregnant' all the time, and so on.
Meet
Shelby Knox, a teenager from Texas who's the subject of a
movie about her discovery that the officially approved dogma in her community regarding sex just didn't make sense - what she did about it, and what she's still doing.
(more below)
The story of Shelby Knox is amazing - and a little scary. How does a kid like that manage to survive in this day and age of deliberate Ignorance through Education? The article
Lone Star Rising by David King in the May 25, 2006 Volume 29 Number 21 issue of
Metroland is well worth reading. Here's several quotes that show why.
Knox counted the number of pregnant girls walking through the halls of her high school. She observed the abstinence-only agenda pushed in her school, in her church and even at local teen hangouts. She noticed that Ed Ainsworth, a local pastor and head of the True Love Waits program she had pledged to, took time out of his evenings to hang out in parking lots proclaiming his distaste for sex before marriage, the damnation awaiting those who partake in it, the uselessness of condoms, and the futility of trying to practice "safe sex." At the same time, she watched as girls in her school were rated by point systems that gauged their "fuckability."
Knox was on the Lubbock Youth Commission, where some other members shared her concerns. "We on the youth commission started listing problems in the community, and one thing that kept coming up was teen pregnancy," says Knox. "So we traced that back to the abstinence-only sex-ed project." The commission began holding rallies, going on talk shows and petitioning the board of education to provide teenagers with full sex education. They pointed out that programs like True Love Waits and federally funded abstinence programs fail kids who are going to have sex anyway, people who are not of the Christian faith, and homosexuals. They insisted that abstinence-only programs lie to kids about the effectiveness of condoms and safe-sex practices.
This story illuminates yet another struggle against the lies, hypocrisy, and willful blindness of those who would take this country into a new Dark Age. It's not a pretty picture.
Knox says that as a Christian she has repeatedly found her own religion being used politically to counter what she sees as common sense. "We are running up against the problem that you can't be religious if you're a member of any other party" than the Republican party, she says. "My generation and the next will run up against this because of the current climate. Myself and other people my age, we have to start embracing the religious side. We have to say, `Yes, we are people of faith, but we are not allowing you to tell us what our religion is!' " During the filming of the documentary about her, Knox met with Ed Ainsworth in an attempt to reconcile her faith with her commitments to sex education. Ainsworth told her, "Christianity is one of the most intolerant religions on the planet. . . . " He then told Knox that she worries him because, "When I hear you speak, I hear tolerance."
Not the least of the reasons the country is going down this road to perdition is the inability of the MSM to do its job, instead reducing everything to trivia.
Ironically, Knox reports that during her time in the spotlight, the media often have missed the point, treating her film as some sort of sensational reality-TV show instead of a work that deals with a serious topic. Knox thinks the media tend to take the easy way out instead of addressing the real topic. She says she has been asked, "Would you have been as good an activist had you been skinny?" and, "Did you end up hooking up with so-and-so from the Lubbock Youth Commission?"
"I grow tired of things like that," she groans. "Things like that really don't matter. There is a bigger picture there. I like to think that it's telling a lot of people's stories. I'm willing to put myself out there for that reason, but I would think people could be a little bit more sophisticated when they ask some of the questions they ask."
Take a look at the story of Shelby Knox and ponder it well. It encapuslates nearly all of the phenomena at work in the larger struggle over what America is becoming. There's a growing hunger for straight talk and honest discussion; Knox's story is part of a dialog beginning to take place more openly as the ongoing trainwreck of BushCo and his base becomes harder to ignore.
You know, if an activist group wanted to stimulate discussion, I could see putting together a Godless Liberal Film Festival featuring "The Education of Shelby Knox" along with "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Fahrenheit 911". It might not hurt to put "All the President's Men" on the bill too. Just contemplating all of those films together in one place at one time might be enough to make a few conservative heads explode.