Sex education in schools

Press, 2 August 1985, Page 16

Sex education in schools

Sir,—At last the stark medical facts about A.I.D.S. are being published. Your article “Hudson returns home after hospital stay” is very sobering. For the protection of all, especially youth, chastity education will have to replace contraceptive vending. Our Government and educational authorities will be guilty of gross negligence if they proceed with sex education or homosexual legislation which puts young people at risk. Unless the Family Planning Association and other “helping agencies” listed in the new health syllabus can guarantee that “keeping ourselves safe” means abstaining from sexual contact and curbing homosexuality, responsible parents will be justified in removing their children from the polluted environment in our schools. The restoration of absolute moral standards is long overdue. God is not mocked: we reap what we sow.—Yours, etc., J. M. NIHONIHO. July 31, 1985.

Sir, — Strange as it might seem to your correspondent, Neville M. Rush (July 30), rejection of God

hardly represents trendiness, or even humanism. The beam in fundamentalist eyes seems to be an absolute refusal to discern that those who disagree with them might have thought through the issues for themselves, a process that was taking place long before the advent of Christianity, as doubtless it will continue long after the creed has been lost to human minds. Morality is not a divinelyinspired rule book surviving immutable. Rather, it is the behaviour and values currently acceptable. As such, it changes. Otherwise, how could it be that God, who one cannot without blasphemy regard as unjust, suffers us not to stone adulterers, etc.? The Bible already shows us that God is unsound on arithmetic, geography, chronology and even natural history. Will He be inconstant too? Or are they distinctively human traits? — Yours, etc., SHAUN JONES. Wellington, July 31, 1985.