Sexual complexity

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
February 21, 2007

Out in Evesham, N.J., a select group of parents is currently circling around the township’s school district on their brooms, huffing and puffing to blow down the house of equality and tolerance. The school district in question had the audacity to show third graders a half-hour instructional video as part of its health curriculum entitled That’s a Family! The video showed families in all permutations: single-parent households, divorced parents, married parents, guardians, adoptive families and yes, homosexual couples.

It is always harmful to show children all the potential kinds of loving and caring households. According to a Feb. 14 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Gay-parent film debate rolls on in Evesham”), the purpose for the film’s distribution was to curtail bullying and intolerance, to provide students with a learning environment in which they would feel safe regardless of their familial structure. The reaction garnered from the film’s sole viewing, however, is less than satisfactory. Parents have responded in myriad ways: sexual morality ought to be taught at home, not in school; the video deals with topics too mature for third graders; and most disturbingly, that the message contained in the video is “disgusting.”

Do they feel it’s unnatural to love someone of your own gender? Such a debate is despicable in and of itself; anyone who truly embraces sexuality rather than fearing it or viewing it as a taboo and sinister force to be hidden in the darkest of bedrooms knows that the origin of a thing does not dictate what rights it is afforded. There is little, if any, debate as to the origins of heterosexual love; aside from the biological necessity of it, no one calls the emotional and sexual approaches to the preference morally reprehensible. An appeal to plumbing strips the sexual act of its full import and reduces humans to naught but baby producers; indeed, no one doubts the love between a sterile couple, for whom the “nature” of intolerant fanatics has denied the “practical” effects of sexual coupling.

Such questions and ponderings are not for adults alone. It is true that an 8-year-old does not need to know the mechanics of homosexual, or heterosexual, coupling, which the film by no means shows. It is the complexity and depth of sexuality that inspires such fear in these parents, but this fear can be rooted out by age-appropriate dialogue.

costellom4@lasalle.edu