The response to the June appeal was so good that the Catholic League will now post two new public service ads. Our first anti-condom ad appeared last June in the New York City subways and generated a great deal of publicity. The “Condoms Don’t Save Lives” ad effectively ended the silence that had been imposed on the sex education debate. Once our ad hit, the entire conversation changed, bringing forth discussion on both the medical and moral dimensions of condom distribution. Our new ads will go beyond even this.
Thanks to the generosity of our members, we will place a new anti-condom ad in the New York City subways this September; it will be followed by another new ad that will appear alongside buses in Washington, D.C. this November. Both ads have already been approved by the appropriate officials in New York and Washington.
The ad that will appear in September reads as follows:
By the time you read this ad, it will already have been posted in the subways, provoking no doubt, great public clamor. As the ad makes clear, the Catholic League regards classroom distribution of condoms to be a foolish ‘ and hypocritical exercise. Only when it comes to sex are educators willing to just give up altogether and assume that young people cannot resist temptation. Educators keep telling youth not to smoke, drink or take drugs, but find it difficult to say that they are too young to engage in sex.
The reigning idea seems to be that adolescents are so sexually programmed that abstinence is all but impossible. This view is dehumanizing: it views young men and women in a mechanistic fashion, casting them as passive agents that merely react to their uncontrollable passions. The Catholic League rejects that position. It believes that young men and women should be treated with dignity, holding them responsible for their behavior.
It might legitimately be asked why any of this is a Catholic League issue. It is true that fighting defamation and discrimination is the heart and soul of what we do, but it is also true that the Catholic League is a rights-driven organization. The way we see it, the free and easy distribution of condoms undercuts the right of Calholic parents to socialize their children according to the precepts of their religion. And no discussion about condoms can proceed very far without addressing this issue.
It is sad to note that the sexperts in the education industry have decided that our kids should be sexually engineered to fit their dream of a liberated society. We disagree. Liberty means the free exercise of religion, speech and other properties associated with the quest for ordered liberty: it does not mean the free exercise of the id. Until that lesson is learned, there will always be some role for the Catholic League. As the name of our journal signifies, our job is not simply to react to events, it is to be a catalyst as well.
