Welcome to Human Life International's 13th World Conference held April 6th through the 10th, 1994. We now join our session recorded live at the Irvine Marriot, in Irvine, California.

Fr. Paul Marx was born in 1920 -- 74 years young -- on a large dairy farm in St. Michael, Minnesota, the 15th of 17 children. He decided at age 15 that he wanted to enter the priesthood, and underwent seminary training at St. John's Prep School, University, and Seminary. His pro-life work began in 1959, when the American Law Institute produced a model bill for states to legalize abortion. In 1970 he founded the Human Life Center in Minnesota at St. John's University, despite much opposition. His book, "The Death Peddlers," officially launched his pro-life career. He subsequently has written four other books. Fr. Marx has traveled to 84 countries spreading the pro-life message. In 1981, He started Human Life International in Washington DC as the umbrella organization for his work. HLI has spawned numerous other pro-life and family organizations world wide. On January 26, 1973, Pope Paul VI told him, and I quote, "You are a courageous fighter, never give up." In 1979, Pope John Paul II told Fr. Paul Marx, and I quote again, "You have lots of experience. You are doing the most important work on earth." Planned Parenthood calls him public enemy number one. The Catholic Twin Circle however has called him in 1991, more appropriately, Catholic of the Year.

Dr. William Coulson, to Fr. Marx's right, is a licensed psychologist. He is the Director of the Research Council on Ethno-psychology, and a long time consultant to the Georgetown University Medical School in Washington, DC. During the Reagan administration he served as a member of the technical advisory panel on drug education curricula for the U. S. Department of Education. Dr. Coulson is a member of the editorial board of Fidelity magazine, a Catholic monthly concerned with preserving the family. He also is consulted on ethno-psychology for Federal Bureau of Prisons and is presently a consultant for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, of the U.S. Justice Department. In the 1960's, Dr. Coulson was research associate to psychologist Carl Rogers at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and helped Dr. Rogers create the country's first program of facilitator training. From 1968 to 1973, the two men co-edited a series of 17 volumes on humanistic education for the Charles Merrill Publishing Company. In 1972 Harper and Row published Dr. Coulson's preliminary analysis of the destructive effects of encounter groups in education, under the title, "Groups, Gimmicks, and Instant Gurus." He has been involved in numerous groups and programs, among them the Today Show, Family Research Council, Psychology Today, ABC's 20/20, The Donahue Show, and many others. Dr. Coulson has also spoken to annual conventions of the AMA, and the American Psychological Association.

Barbara McGuigan is Human Life International's Education Director for the state of California. She was the outstanding conference chairwoman for HLI's World Conference on Love, Life, and the Family held here in Irvine in 1988. And she is also this conference's chairwoman, and I think she's doing a very nice job. I hope you agree. You should really see her speaking with the youth, and -- across the hall -- she's really socking it to them with the chastity education, and she's really doing a nice job. Barbara appears on national television and radio, and she conducts the pro-life and family educational seminars. She holds workshops on Humanae Vitae and conscience, and she teaches chastity in the California Catholic school system. She also is involved in the healing process of post-abortion counseling. She is the mother of four, the grandmother of three, and a tireless messenger to thousands of teens and young adults who are encouraged and motivated by her great faith and example.

Fr. Marx: Thank you very much. I am honored to be with Bill Coulson and Barbara McGuigan. What I do wrong they can correct.

I have to talk to you about chastity tonight. That's what sex education is all about. And I'd like to set the stage. What does the Catholic church really teach? Very simple. The Catholic church, and there is no doubt about this, says that the parents have the prime right and duty to educate their children in this most important, most sensitive area. However, according to Familiaris Consortio, the parents can delegate some of this authority to educational institutions or persons whom they trust, while the parents are always in charge, always know what those children are exposed to, what those teachers say and do. That's the teaching of the Catholic Church. And if you ever read the encyclical on education which came out in 1889, by Pius XI, you will see how he has wonderfully put that how delicate this area is and how sensitive it must be handled. So that even in teaching sex education, you have to be careful what you say and how you say it. Too ridiculous the modern mania for sex education courses which are mostly organ recitals, anatomy lessons. And the most important thing of course, teaching in this area, is morality. That's the most important thing. Sexual activity inherently involves morality, and has enormous consequences.

Our family life in this country and throughout the Western world is in a mess because our young people are so confused, they've been so misinformed and as a result they are incapable of establishing a permanent relationship in married life. They've toyed with sex. They have all kinds of false ideas, and I must remind you that every misdeed in the area of human sexuality has a consequence on family life. I like to think that human sexuality is coextensive with personality and spirituality. The trouble is when people think about sex they only think about a sliver of it, the physical. We are sexual beings in our total function. Freud was right when he said that every human relationship is a sexual one, in the wide sense. You never debate whether the person you're talking to is a man or a woman. You make that unconsciously. And I had that brought home to me that we are sexual beings that sexuality, spirituality, are co-terminus -- personality, spirituality, sexuality.

When I took 35 girls through Europe on a tour for 64 days in 10 countries, I was their chaplain, I was their tour guide, and I learned then, I knew it before, girls and boys are very different. And I remember we were in the ship, on the ocean you have everything on the ship that you need -- a chaplain, a funeral process, everything. So they like to keep you happy because it's a small place. You can't afford to have riots, or a lot of unhappy people. So we were down deep in the hold, watching a movie of some kind, when the gentle announcement came over that there's an iceberg far off. Our radar steers us clear of those things, and you can stay where you are but if you want to come up, you can see it. We all came up, I can assure you. And here was this tip of ice you know, and everyone knew there was a mountain of ice below, you see. And human sexuality is like that. The physical is only the tip you see. Most of it's unseen. It's psychological. It's spiritual. That's what people don't catch. If you don't believe in God and morality, you don't catch it. Like the ancient pagans, you just play with it and when you get pregnant you abort or kill after birth. Well, let me elaborate further.

Chastity is a part of the cardinal virtue of temperance therefore they are called cardinal because it comes from the Latin word cardo, cardinis, which means hinge. Our whole moral life hinges around these virtues. They are prudence, to make good judgments based on right knowledge; justice, giving each person you meet his due, and to do your duty to the group, etc.; fortitude, to have the strength to do what you know to be right, you might know what to do but you don't do it because you are weak, you need fortitude, you need courage; and finally temperance. Now temperance regulates our appetites, the appetite for food or drink, or sex.

When you talk to young people you convince them that if you eat too much you get fat, you threaten your life, you will live a shorter life, you'll have health problems. They understand that. If you drink too much you become an alcoholic, you lose your job, ruin your family. They tend to agree to that. When it comes to sex, anything is supposed to go. That's the most powerful of drives, and when that goes out of whack, then everything goes wrong. When chastity goes, everything else goes, because it makes religion or morality very, very distasteful, like a straight jacket. Any priest who works with youth for a long period of time or even a short period of time will know how cold words become, to a boy or girl who gets involved with physical sex. I'm not talking about the occasional infraction, but no chastity, no other virtues. In fact someone wrote we prove our charity for one another by controlling our sexual impulses. Solzhenitsyn defined love as self restriction. When you love someone you restrict yourself to serve that person -- self restriction. And when it comes to sex there has to be a lot of self restriction from the very beginning or there won't be any later on. I suggest to you that a lot of people are incapable of getting married because by the time they are married they've fooled around with sex so long and have acquired so many bad appetites in this area, and so many bad habits that it is almost impossible to reverse. Keep in mind, I think Bill Coulson would agree with me, from my readings of psychology, that the basic personality is laid by three or four years.

The greatest thing that the parents can do for their children is to love each other properly. If a father and mother really love each other they give a model to that boy or to that girl, you see. Now if they don't love each other and use each other in all manner of ways including sexually, there is going to be a conflict. And it's going to be sown in the personalities of the children. Married people have one overwhelming reason to get along and really love each other, because if they don't, it's going to show itself in the children. We know from sociological studies that parents tend to reproduce their kind, I mean families, that they produce the same family. And the reason is that a boy needs a model mother, a female who is loving and truly a woman. He gets an idea of a woman. When he goes out to look for a partner he has a pattern in his head to look for. But if his mother is a cold fish and selfish, etc., feminist in the wrong sense of that word, bad sense of that word; he has no model to measure by. And so the girl needs a father who is strong, loving, really male, self-controlled. She has that in her head when she seeks a mate. They say that girls tend to marry boys like their father, that's why so many mothers cry at weddings.

Now a little about the history of sex education. Sweden really started in 1956 in modern times when they mandated sex education from kindergarten through 12. In 1964, 140 Swedish doctors approached the government and said, "For God sakes stop this nonsense, because this sex education is ruining our youth and ruining our society." 140, or was it 130 Swedish doctors. Interestingly and completely separately. There were 400 doctors in Germany in the same year who did the same thing, in which they predicted what would happen if this raw sex education would continue. Now both countries are in a very bad way. Well the whole of Europe is as a matter of fact.

Now in the U.S.A. they say the sexual revolution began with the Kinsey report, and you know that's a fraudulent piece of research, in 1948. And if you read "Blessed are the Barren" -- I suggest you buy that book-it's the history of Planned Parenthood. In there you'll find a long chapter on the history of sex education and they trace it back to Planned Parenthood, who generated SIECUS, the Sex Information and Education Council in the United States. That's where it came from more or less, and many Catholics and Protestants and other religious groups fell for the whole thing.

When you look at whether sex education has succeeded or not, every study that I have seen shows it to be a complete and total failure. Everywhere. I know of no successful program.

There's this wonderful Protestant minister, I can't think of his name, who founded the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi. Donald Wildmon, yes. Don Wildmon. He has a very wonderful study to show the more money has been paid into sex education, the more abuse of sex, the more pregnancies, the more VD, etc. After the war I think there were 7 million diseases in this country, today, there are 44 million. In all other countries, I've watched carefully, sex education has been a total failure. It succeeded nowhere. And it can't succeed because it is an anachronism. Let me read something to you. Is it possible for sex education to be morally neutral? That is the provocative question of tonight's round table discussion. As I pondered over my approach to the subject, I wondered is it possible for sex education to be immorally neutral? Of course the answer to both questions is unequivocally -- no. The concept of moral and immoral clearly infers belief in God. Sex education is simply amoral, without morals, for God does not exist and cannot exist where sex, AIDS education advocates.

The religion of our government schools is secular humanism, a non-theistic religion which does not believe in any power greater than self. Hence the euphemistic and meaningless terminology used by the sexologists - "morally neutral" makes no sense. Morally neutral to these people means do your own thing. Do anything that makes you happy at the moment for there are no absolutes in life, no right or wrong. You make your own moral rules. Sex education, and it's clone, AIDS education, are completely lacking in Judeo Christian moral guidelines. Evidence of the consequences of the amoral aspect of these evil courses of instruction can be found in the US Senate report called Code Blue. Here can be found the results of sex education that show, among other things, a 621% rise in teen pregnancies, a 300% rise in teen suicides, a 232% increase in teen homicides, and 400,000 abortions on teenage girls every year. And this does not cover the unrevealed statistics relating to the astronomical rise in sexually transmitted diseases among the adolescent population, especially with regard to those who practice homosexuality. So you see, the figures all show that the typical sex education that's going on in the public schools and in many Catholic schools is a total disaster. On that, we critique the six major sex education programs in this country. And I think if you read them, you'll be astonished at what was in there. The New Creation series, I can tell you tonight, a lot of you don't know it, but Fr. Hardon critiqued that whole series. He told me it was far worse than he expected. He spent four months on it, and he said it's a tissue of all the heresies that have ever been found in Christianity, with a total dissent to Humanae Vitae. Then the others, take a look at these later if you want. Perhaps the second worst is Jean Styre, where girls are supposed to watch for their mucus when they're 11 or 12 years of age, and keep records, making them completely physical sex conscious, etc. etc. Unbelievable. And these are used because the bishops have not read those, the priests have not read those, and the parents are often called in for one night, they are quickly given a pep talk by the company that puts them out, and then they are asked for their signature. They're again (told) that this is going to be good, it's used all over the country, and in starts the stuff. So, every one of those is very bad.

Now I can't understand this mania for sex education. I have engaged in it myself as has virtually every priest in this room I'm sure. I say if you teach the whole faith the fallenness of man, his need for grace, prayer, penance, the sacraments, confession, the devotion to Mary the mother of God, and you teach Christianity in the light of today's circumstances, you will insure chastity, because knowledge never made anyone riches, some of the smartest people are in jails. (That) was a great error of Socrates. He thought people committed foolish crimes because they didn't know, they didn't have knowledge, then they wouldn't do that. That's not true. We know from our own experience we often know better but we don't do what we know we should be doing as St. Paul talked about in one of his epistles. So my point is this: to talk about physical sex apart from morality is an enormous mistake. I insist that talk (of) physical sex in a classroom of adolescent boys and girls is already an occasion of sin, I maintain. And I say that you will achieve chastity only in terms of religion and morality because you'll never build in the virtue of self control which is so important in this area. Number 1, if it doesn't begin early in life, and very early, and cultivated constantly -- I don't know what school you went to but I went to a Catholic school with nuns and they said to us, every night say two Hail Marys for purity they called it. Some nuns said to say three. They were more pessimistic about human nature. And I suppose there are some that say five. And they might be more right than those who say two. The point is this if you teach the whole faith, you will ensure chastity. If you talk only about sex, you only make things worse. Now they say they don't only talk about sex, but I'm afraid they do. In some Catholic schools for example they canceled religion courses and just talk about physical, biological, anatomical sex. Tell me, why does a girl or boy need to know the last word about all the sexual organs when they're three years old? Tell me why does an 11 year old girl have to know all the positions of intercourse? And this is defended.

Another reason I am against sex education of this kind and other kinds like it, is that in the Catholic church today, one can conservatively say that 90% of Catholic teachers married and fertile are either contracepting or are sterilized. Now tell me, do you really think they can generate or inspire chastity when they themselves don't believe in it? They don't practice it. There's an old saying that is partially true that religion is more caught than taught. And the teacher better believe what he is trying to get across to his students because somehow they sense whether or not he believes what he is conveying. And when it comes to chastity, I think it's all the more true that only chaste people can teach this very delicate virtue. And that's what the Popes are saying in their encyclicals all the time. Not everybody can engage in this where the parents delegate them to do so. And I think that has been overlooked. Now, what impressed people at Fatima when Mary appeared to those three girls, is that these children were given a vision of hell at one time, and they were told that more people go to hell because of lack of chastity (than) any other reason. When we look at the modern world, and how there is so little chastity, and how there is so much playing with sex, I can understand that. It's not an exaggeration, I don't think.

Well let me just say a few more things. It's so important for us to start early with the child and I do think there is a latency period from birth on to 10, 11, 12, depending. And I think anyone who denies it hasn't watched children, because one reason children are so delightful, so attractive, is because they're so innocent. You can see this. And to barge in with raw sex and to disturb these years of innocence as the Pope called it in Familiaris Consortio, these years of innocence, is really a horrible thing to do. So am I for sex education? Of course I am, at the right time. So it is built in through the religion course, where morality is emphasized, where there isn't too much detail given, depending on age. And I do believe as Familiaris Consortio says that by the time a person becomes an adult, he ought to know the physiological process of reproduction. I believe that it can be carefully taught. And for Catholics, they have a wonderful opportunity here to avail of the marvelous natural family planning we know about. And you're looking at a priest that has taught this to more couples and students than anyone I've ever met. They used to call me Fr. Rhythm at St. John's abbey. And you can't tell me it doesn't work. I know thousands of couples who have worked it. And that's also a part of natural family planning. Ever since I was ordained in 1947, I have said that no one should get married unless they know where babies come from. And take it from me, 95% don't know. By that I mean understanding the reproductive system of human sexuality is not like animal sex, which is instinctual. You see, the animals never disobey God. There is a rutting period, they have copulation, no intercourse, that's a human personal experience, they copulate and they get five puppies later on.

Now with the human it's a very different kind of thing. It's not the same at all. And the more you study it, the more I think you respect it. You see, there is a reason why the good Lord made the human female so infertile, the most infertile of all mammalian animals on earth. One 24 hour period in one cycle, and the sperm can last about three days. There are four days theoretically when the couple can get pregnant. Now because women are so changeable, which makes them so interesting I guess, ovulation can shift, so you have to add days, but the average time is about 8 or 9 days of abstinence in one cycle. Now if you say that to some men who have never had discipline, never learned to love, they think that's terrible, you couldn't live like that, you'd die. Well I have news for them. No one ever died for lack of sex. If tomorrow there's a funeral wagon going by, there's a man in one of those coffins, whatever he died of you can be sure it wasn't lack of sex. But you see, we have to rethink this whole thing in a culture that is so pagan, so physically sex oriented. It is very difficult I admit, for parents to raise their children in this area, and perhaps the best thing I can say is that as parents live the faith and guard your children, shut off TV, control it. And cultivate interesting things in your home. I have never met a set of parents who read whose children did not read. I think that's terribly important. There are so many marvelous things in this world to read and know about, and it's such a tragedy to see young people get stuck with this physical sexual crippling of personality and morality.

So now I will let Bill Coulson here straighten all this out. Let me just say this. I travel a lot as you know. What Bill Coulson has condemned in non-directive counseling, values clarification, all that, you'll find it in every country in the world, and now they call it life skills. There are a couple more books, over there. "Educating in Chastity," by Dr. Dunn, a wonderful gynecologist, now retired, and "Challenging Children to Chastity," which is a book written to tell the parents what their duty is and how they might accomplish it, then throw the book away and do it yourself. And the best example, the best thing you can do is to example chastity, true love. And also "What's Wrong with Sex Education?" by Melvin Anchell, who happens to be Jewish, and who thinks sex education, like Bofenbender, the great child psychologist said, is impossible. Sex education has got to be done by the parents in the home, in that first nucleus, in which that base personality is formed and shaped. And "Sex and Social Engineering", I think is a must too. It gives you great insight as to what these modern sexologists have in mind and do. Finally, it's the best book that I know, "Chastity", written in 1953 by a very wise Jesuit, Gerald Kelly. It's not just about sexual lives, but about love, and wonderful human, philosophical, and psychological insights into the functioning of the human being. I suggest this to you very much. Thank you very much.

Bill Coulson:
William Marcilio and Frank Mott, a couple of researchers at Ohio State University, did a review of a survey of 12,000 American young adults a number of years ago. It was published. The study was published in Family Planning Perspectives. I guess it was '86. July - August 1986. They were looking at what factors lead to early sexual experience on the part of young people, and they found what they called four co-factors for early sexual experience. One of them was race, can't do anything about that, you have to stay the race that you're born in. But unfortunately, black youngsters are more likely to become sexually active than other youngsters in this society. It's not their fault, it's not the fault of their parents, that's just the way it is. Again, nothing you can do about that. Another co-factor for early sexual experience was parental level of education. The children of college graduates interestingly enough were less likely to have had early sexual experience than the children of those who had gotten a lesser level of education. But you can't do anything about that either, you can't become an instant college graduate. If you haven't gone, your children are going to be at risk. The third co-factor was long term church going. The children of long term church goers are far less likely to become sexually active than other kids. It turns up again and again in the research. The best protection our children have for sexual experimentation or drug experimentation, or other forms of crime is to get them to church regularly from the very earliest time, but again you cannot become an instant long term church goer. If you haven't been going there's nothing you can do about it today.

The fourth co-factor for early sexual experience is the one you can control, and that was sex education itself. Children who had sex education had a 40% greater likelihood of having had early sexual experience than children who had not had sex education. So the conclusion is obvious, don't let your kids get sex education. I agree completely with Fr. Marx.

Father has been so good to Jeannie and me. We've gotten to go so many interesting places because of him, and recently we were in Ireland. It was my third trip in 18 months, in every case sponsored by Human Life International. And the first time I was there in the fall of 1992, a group of concerned parents approached me about a program that the government is putting out. They thought it was sex education. The government said no, it's child sex abuse prevention. And the parents are right, the government is wrong. It will not prevent child sexual abuse; it will cause it, for reasons that I'll try to share with you rather quickly, but the program is called "Stay Safe." It's offered to youngsters throughout the elementary grades and it says this. As a psychologist, this caught my eye. Paying attention to feelings tells us what to do. It proposes a boy named Shane who has a new bicycle, his mother has told him not to take the bike away from the neighborhood. Shane rides the bike downtown. A bully sees him on it, knocks him off the bike, takes it from him, breaks the headlight, and then returns the bike to Shane. Shane now has to go home and deal with his mother, says the "Stay Safe" lesson for real little kids. It says Shane can tell what to do if he pays attention to how he feels inside. And in the video tape that comes with this, a boy is asked by a stuffed animal, (most of these programs for youngsters have stuffed animals as the wise person, far wiser than the parents in every case), but the stuffed animal asks the boy if he has ever been abused by his father. And he said, well my father does play rough with me sometimes, you see he's got a scratchy beard and sometimes he gives me these rough kisses and Pageot, the puppet asks well how do you feel about that? And the boy says I don't like it. Clearly, it's not sexual abuse, it's just horseplay. But he doesn't like the horseplay, and Pageot says, have you told anyone about it? And the boy says no, I don't want to get my Pop in trouble. And says the puppet, (our children are taking instructions now from puppets and stuffed animals in school), says the puppet, that doesn't matter, if you get a "no" feeling, that means he's doing something wrong. That is a most extraordinary claim. If you get a "no" feeling, and if you don't like what he's doing, that means he is doing something wrong. This is a world then in which all we have to do in order to know what the world is like is to read our reactions to it. This puts the child in the position of being God.

Says this program a little further on: the parts of your body covered by your swimsuit are private and special and no one has the right to touch you there. I think we would all agree with that. Asks the program why; answers the program, because it's your body. Why do people not have the right to touch you beneath your swimming suit? Because it's your body. Your body belongs to you and no one has the right to give you a "no" feeling. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Catholic country. What is this Father, 96% of the Irish people claim the Catholic faith? "It's my body", is the weakest, most ideological, and controversial of reasons in a Catholic country ,to say that no one has the right to touch you beneath your swimming suit. The only adequate claim about why you shouldn't be touched beneath your swimming suit is because it's wrong. W-R-O-N-G. It is forbidden. It is not to be done. It violates the sixth commandment. All of these reasons that Father was talking about, the only kind of sex education that would make any sense is within a moral framework. It's not being done, even in this Catholic country.

We'll show you what I found in an American book for pre-school children. This comes from Parenting Press in Seattle, Washington. If you feel uncomfortable inside, don't share your body, says the book, "It's My Body." If you feel uncomfortable inside, don't share your body. Says "Stay Safe" on page 13 of the junior lessons, you can say no to an adult if they are asking you to do something that is dangerous, wrong, or uncomfortable. These are mixed categories. Two of them are objective, dangerous and wrong are objective, and indeed you must say no to someone who asks you to do something dangerous and wrong, but what if homework makes you uncomfortable? What if helping with the dishes makes you uncomfortable? Says "It's My Body," if you feel uncomfortable inside, don't share it. What's the corollary to that? "You will probably feel warm inside when you share your body because you want to." This puts the whole burden of morality on wants and needs. It moves morality out of the realm of religion and into the realm of psychology. Pop-psychology at that.

This is the basic problem with sex education, not only in our country but all over the world that Father has permitted me to travel. That it tries to make do for objective standards of right and wrong, absolute standards if you will. It tries to make our feelings do for that. It's giving the children a terrible burden. They are being placed in the center of their own world of experience and they can't handle it. That's why in this country suicide has become the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15 to 24.

About Sister Kirin Sawyer, a school sister of Notre Dame, if you want to know about the school sisters of Notre Dame,(showing a book)read Donna Steichen's book, "Ungodly Rage," there's an interesting section in there about the SSND's, but the title of this book of sex education for Catholic youngsters is "Sex and the Teenager" and the subtitle is "Choices and Decisions." It implies to the children that they have some choice about sex, when you and I know, and the law agrees, that they don't. You know when we go to war we have an expression we use, we have no choice. When we confront what is exigent, what is necessary matter, we say we have no choice. We have to do the right thing. The problem of sex for children is a problem of recognition. They cannot recognize what they have not been made to see. What they must be made to see is that they must never even think about having sex before or outside of marriage. Instead, Sister Kirin Sawyer is teaching them that they have choices and decisions. That's an interesting redundancy.

This book is from ETR and Associates, it is a Planned Parenthood spinoff, Planned Parenthood of Santa Cruz county, for helping teens choose sexual abstinence, they want children to understand what abstinence is in the modern era. As a teacher, counselor, or youth leader, or health care provider, and personally as a parent, you want to help teenagers understand that sexual abstinence, namely the voluntary avoidance of sexual intercourse is the positive choice for them. Two things wrong with that, it's not a choice, it's a necessity; and secondly it's misdefined. Abstinence is not the voluntary avoidance of sexual intercourse, but abstinence is the necessary avoidance of sexual intercourse. Planned Parenthood, and that spun off ETR Network Associates don't make a nickel off of abstinence. The way Planned Parenthood makes its big dollars is with abortion, and the way it gets abortions is by selling contraception to kids, or giving it away, because they know very well the data that show that kids are lousy contraceptors. Kids can't rent an automobile. If you try to rent an automobile and you are under 25 today from a major automobile rental agency, you're going to have a problem. That's because the automobile rental agencies understand that you don't have a whole brain if you're under 25. The human brain continues to develop throughout the adolescent years and until about the age of 25 the work of the healing of the two hemispheres of the brain isn't done. You don't have a whole brain. You can't rent a car. Well, Planned Parenthood wants children to become persuaded that they are quite capable, thank you, of taking care of themselves. And they'll decide for themselves about sex, say the people at Planned Parenthood. That's a wonderful idea.

Nancy Fiore said to Trish Knightly, the research director and education director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America: "What's your reaction to those findings?" And she said, "That study is our Achilles heel." But it has not been their Achilles heel, it's your children's Achilles heel. Planned Parenthood is doing very well promoting the sale of their products to your children. This was in the USA Today.(showing a newspaper) Probably you'll be interested in this one. Two pages in the same edition of USA Today this Wednesday this week: Increased cancer risk taking birth -- I'm going to quote it here -- taking birth control pills for more than a decade or starting them early in life increases a woman's risk of developing breast cancer before the age of 45. Now there have been data which have been suggestive of this, but this is a brand new study published this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Two things that Planned Parenthood promotes lead to early breast cancer. Taking the birth control pill early in life and using it for a decade or more. Each one of those factors increases the likelihood of early breast cancer by 30% to 50%. Teenagers get on the pill courtesy of Planned Parenthood and SIECUS, and the Ortho Division of Johnson and Johnson, which gives away a free sex education program called "Straight Talk" because I suppose they want your kids for customers too. Kids who get on their program will be more likely to have breast cancer if they're young women. Now notice how proud we have to be to be Catholics. Here's the Vatican opposing the United Nations' new population plan. The second paragraph of that lower article says the United Nation's proposal calls for all countries to insure access to family planning for everyone, including adolescents by the year 2015. That's what they're going to want adolescents to take. They're going to want them to take the birth control pill which produces early breast cancer. It's almost as if they don't care. It's almost as if there is a longing to depopulate the world.

Condoms aren't safe. Dr. Mike Roland works for the US Office of Naval Research in Washington and wrote an article for the Journal of Rubber Chemistry and Technology, indicating that there are inherent flaws in condoms which make them unsuitable for the prevention of disease as well as for the prevention of pregnancy. Dr. Roland in this letter to the Camden, New Jersey Courier Post indicates, that because the AIDS virus is 450 times smaller than sperm, the effectiveness of condoms for AIDS prevention is actually much worse than for contraception, and it's bad enough for that. But then he goes on to say that it is a well established fact that latex rubber contains inherent flaws which are at least fifty times larger than the AIDS virus. Inherent means, he says, the flaws are naturally occurring. They can not be prevented. AIDS cannot be prevented if your children are persuaded to use condoms. Now I showed that at the University College, Dublin, in February two years ago, and the story was picked up by the Irish Democrat, a very fine Catholic family weekly newspaper, the editor of the Democrat reproduced the letter from Dr. Roland and then a couple of weeks later he called me in the middle of the night saying that the other side is challenging this report. They say: 1) There is no such thing as the Camden Courier Post, and 2) Dr. Roland is not reachable. They couldn't find the newspaper and so they concluded that it didn't exist. And they couldn't reach Dr. Roland so they said no, we can't contact him, we're not smart enough to find his phone number; they said rather, he isn't reachable. This is that fundamental confusion that we are going to see more and more often in our own children. They are going to come to believe that they are the center of the universe, and if I can't do something, it can't be done. That's what that means. So Dr. Roland does indeed exist.

Ed Mazlow, a Jewish professor at a Jewish university, concerned about the loss of Jewish intelligence by his students, the loss of the instinct for tribal preservation, became concerned toward the end of his life, about the inordinant influence of the homosexual population. He wrote this particular paragraph in 1964. It has of course become much worse since then. Sex education in the United States, whether in public schools or Catholic schools, by and large reflects a homosexual sensibility. Homosexuals don't have any other way to protect against AIDS, since abstinence seems to be beyond their ideology even to consider, and so they have to sell condoms. But they want to sell them to your kids as well, your kids who have no inclination to do homosexual deeds, are being steered toward a homosexual life style, if only so that the homosexuals aren't quite so exposed in their habits. Dr. Mazlow said this about the homosexuals: they seem confident that they are perceiving something, that they have vision, they are accordingly decisive, authoritative, confident, that all the 99% of us who are dim, unsure, uncertain, will follow along, will defer to them, will accept their opinion even when it's crazy or distorted. So the homosexuals can set taste in art, fashions, music, and God knows what else. God knows what else is sex education today. Because they are decisive, the indecisive ones, the rest of us, will accept their visions, but he says, these are the authentic, real perceptions of homosexuals, and therefore quite unsuitable for non-homosexuals. Also, just as homosexuals are fickle and have whims, and changeable tastes, so is fashion changeable and fickle. The homosexual falls in love for sure, but it doesn't last long. These are the people who want to lead our children down the garden path called sex education.

Recently, a friend clipped an article for me from Esquire magazine, "The Lost Daughter." It's about this terrible problem we have of what is called false memory syndrome, of young adults who become persuaded in psychotherapy, whether professional or amateur in variety, that they have been sexually abused by their parents. There's a couple of paragraphs in here that indicate the problem that I have suggested should be thought of as the confusion between subjective taste and objective, absolute, morality. The horrifying memories, writes the author of this article, the horrifying memories of child abuse regularly unearthed in therapy sessions across the country these days often defy belief as the stream of what some psychologists call recovered detail grows increasingly repulsive and outlandish to anyone who sets out to explore a case like the one involving Donna Smith. She happens to be the young woman who accused her parents of sex abuse, falsely accused them, as it turns out; though sincerely accused them. Cases like the one involving Donna Smith, anybody who studies those eventually, suspects that at some point the patient and the therapist have entered an imaginary realm of their own creation, one in which facts, fantasy, and suggestion become interchangeable, and are accepted with equal ease as the truth. It's no accident that the Holy Father's new encyclical is called Veritatis Splendor, the splendor of the truth. We may be the last people on earth who have a corporate commitment to truth telling. The psychologists and the psychiatrists and the social workers certainly don't. When pressed about this matter, says the author, psychiatrists, even those who subscribe to the idea of an incest epidemic, will admit that they have no way of knowing whether what their patients are telling them is literally true. At any rate, they'll say the accuracy of memory is irrelevant because factual or not, it expresses some emotional truth for the patient. The pain is genuine even if the cause is uncertain. All that may have been true throughout most of the twentieth century when whatever transpired between patient and therapist remained confidential, but now therapists have to tell what their patients tell them, and we are on an orgy of inventing stories of sexual abuse. I think it's precisely because of our disordered society, the kind of images that come through the media, most especially over television. We are sex obsessed and we think somebody is to blame for it, and in a therapy obsessed society, we tend to blame Mom and Dad for it.

Here's what a couple of psychologists, Maggie Brock of McGill University and Steven Ketchy of Cornell University, did and they reported in the Psychological Bulletin last June, in an article titled "The Suggestibility of the Child Witness - An Historical Review and Synthesis." What they did was try to understand how these false memories are generated and it's important for us tonight when we talk about sex education, because your children are getting in sex education, whether in public school or parochial, they are getting lessons in the production of false memories. Because they are being introduced to something that they cannot handle, because a very important and necessary historical taboo against sex talk with little children is being violated, you are going to pay the price because they are going to remember some things about you that are highly unlikely to be true. Here's what they did, the two psychologists. They interviewed a four year old boy for 11 consecutive weeks. Every time they met the interviewers said, "You went to the hospital because your finger got caught in a mouse trap. Did this ever happen to you?" That was what they said every time to the child. Here is a sample of his week to week responses. A four year old child. The first week he says, "No, I've never been to the hospital." The second week he says, "Yes, I cried." The third week he says, "Yes, my Mom went to the hospital with me." The fourth week he said, " Yes, I remember. It felt like a cut." In the eleventh week, the child said, "Uh-hmm, my Daddy, Mommy, and my brother took me to the hospital in our van. The hospital gave me a little bandage, and it was right here." And he pointed to his finger. The whole thing was an invention. It came from the implantation of the idea. This is what sex education does. The interviewer then asked the boy in the eleventh week, "Well, how did it happen that your finger got cut?" The boy said, "I was looking, and then I didn't see what I was doing and my finger got in there somehow. The mouse trap was in our house because there's a mouse in our house. The mouse trap is down in the basement next to the firewood. I was playing a game called operation and then I went downstairs and I said to Dad, 'I want to eat lunch' and then it got stuck in the mouse trap. My Daddy was down in the basement collecting firewood. My brother pushed me into the mouse trap. It happened yesterday. The mouse was in our house yesterday. I caught my finger in the mouse trap yesterday. I went to the hospital." All of it imagined, but the boy believed every word of it. Now he could turn in his brother for pushing him into the mouse trap, but better from the perspective of those who hate good families, is for the boy to come for a twelfth week, and to decide it was his Daddy who did it, not only pushed him into the mouse trap, but sexually abused him once he had him down. And Daddy would go to jail.

Here's what John Leo, the excellent essayist for US News and World Report who used to write for Time magazine, reported back in September 1981. An article on the pedophile movement in the United States. He quoted David Thorstat, a homosexual and militant spokesman for the pedophiliac movement, who says he is fighting for the rights of children to control their own bodies. That's the problem. When I spoke in Switzerland recently I put it this way, and it seemed to make sense to the people of Switzerland, who are fighting problems very similar to our own. I said ladies and gentleman, the left wants to steal your children from you. And they will do it the more thoroughly and the more quickly for the fact of your Catholic faith. We cannot let it happen. Thank God for Fr. Marx. Thank God for Human Life International.

Mrs. McGuigan: Well I wasn't able to hear these two most eloquent speakers, but what I would like to do is maybe start on a positive note and talk to you about what I do, what I'm teaching in our schools. Kind of an alternative to this mess that we have, the sex education atrocity going on in our schools. I give many, many seminars, all day retreats on God's plan for love and life, I am invited into an eighth grade classroom, or a high school, or a retreat, an all day thing, by the parents, and the principal, and the eighth grade teachers, whatever teachers in the high school too, and it's kind of a crash course on God's plan for love and life. First of all, just to kind of explain to you how we start the day. If it's a school that is close by to me, I will go and take the place of the religion class, and I will go every day for five days. And we will get this all covered in a five day period. If the school is too far, like I'll be in Canada, and Texas, and Chicago, and I have a couple other places that I'll be going to by the end of June. Then, I will give this in a whole day, with mandatory parent meeting the night before, when all the parents must come, at least one from each family. They must come because so many of the parents have never been taught some of the things, unfortunately, that I will be teaching their children, like Humanae Vitae, important things like that. So it's important for communication between parent and child, that the parents have a clear understanding of what their children will be getting that day. So always, a mandatory parent meeting the night before. The first day is a very wonderful day, very good day, and we talk about pretty much why life is sacred. What it means to be made in the image and likeness of almighty God. And I have a very simple little diagram that I use, and I always ask my angel to go to all the guardian angels of everyone to whom I will be speaking, because the angels enlighten our intellects, right? So, I always tell the kids, I know you will remember everything that is said, well maybe not everything, but everything God wanted you to remember. That's all that's important.

So you give them some very easy ways to know why life is sacred. First of all, because we came from God, and we are going back to God. Which is precisely why life is sacred. St Augustine says because of our origin, and our destiny, but even more because we are made in the image and likeness of God. And these are bottom line reasons. I'm into teaching bottom line reasons why. I think it was Thomas Aquinas who said to avoid evil because it is evil is good, but to avoid evil because you understand why it is evil is better. We are using our intellects to reason why. And when you know why something is wrong, you're more committed to doing what is right. So we are giving a lot of bottom line reasons.

Being made in the image and likeness of God means that we have the ability to think, and I will be drawing a circle on the board with a little line through the top like a thinking cap. We have intellects. We are not animals. And so much of the propaganda that goes on now, save Willie, save the whales, save the spotted owl, like we're all a bunch of animals running around together in one big zoo. Well they have to realize that we are not animals. We have intellects. God gave us the ability to think, to reason. So we have the ability to think. We have the ability to choose. And I would draw a hand on the board then. What did God give us to choose with? A free will. This is something I'm pulling out of the kids. A lot of times, the kids do know this. Pretty much of the time they don't quite as well as I wish they would in the eighth grade or high school. So we have a free will. We can accept God or we can reject God, you know, all very simple terms. And so often then I will tie in what the pro-abortion propaganda is. Well I have the right to choose. How many times have we all heard that? The right to choose what? We have the freedom to choose wrong. Our God is definitely for freedom of choice. He gave us a free will. We have the freedom to choose wrong, but we don't have the right. No one ever has the right to choose evil. We have to make these clear distinctions for the kids.

So we have the right to, the ability to think, the ability to choose, and then the ability to love. And then I would draw a heart on the board. Our great, infinite God has given us the ability to know and love Him, the creator, and of course to know and love ourselves. The more we know and love God, the more we will know ourselves. I'm reading the dialogue of St. Catherine of Sienna, and she says the more we know God, the more self knowledge we will have. Then we can kind of see how we measure up. Not always a pretty picture is it? So we have the ability to think, to choose and to love. This is what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. Now I stress this, and I'm just going to highlight some of the things I do stress, some of the areas that are most receptive by the kids. They really do want to learn this very much. To think, to choose, and to love. It's important that they understand that to be made in the image and likeness of God is the bottom line reason why we can't kill unborn babies, we can't kill newborn babies because they are less than perfect, and we can't kill the long born by euthanasia. Because we came from God, we are going back to God, and we are made in his image and likeness. That's a bottom line reason.

Then we move over into our great gift from God, our sexuality. We take that same golden thread, that same basic truth over into our sexuality. The very reason why you cannot use, own, or manipulate another human being or yourself is because this person, or we ourselves, was made in the image and likeness of God. The bottom line reason. You don't mess around with the image and likeness of God. This person is special. This life is sacred. God has a purpose. So I go through some scriptures with the kids. I won't go through them with you. I'll just tell you what they are. Psalm 139 of course, David's psalm. What I want them to understand really is how fearfully and how wonderfully they are made. And the kids read the Scriptures. The whole classroom comes alive. It's such a privilege to be able to do this. I am so thankful to God to be called to this work. So they read these Scriptures, and we really study Psalm 139 1-13,15 because I'm leading up to why life once again is so sacred, how much they are loved by almighty God, how important, how special they are.

Then we move over into how God loves each of us individually. He doesn't love us like a glob of humanity. He loves each and every one of us personally and individually. This is what God means when He speaks through the prophet Jeremiah. Here's another Scripture. I have loved you with an eternal love, this is why in loving kindness I have created you. Also to the same Jeremiah, God said, before I formed you in your mother's womb I knew you. And when the kids hear this, many times it's the first time they've heard it. I knew you before you were conceived in your mother's womb. Think about it. Before your Mom and Dad even met, God knew you, just you, exactly you, with your same eyes, your same hair color, your same skin color, your talents, your gifts, your voice, your family. We could have been born in another time, but this is exactly when God wanted us to be. Sometimes I wonder why we couldn't have been born in another time these days, right? But when you stop and think about it, this world is really a giant saint making machine. So praise God that we do live in this time. Praise God that we might have an opportunity to suffer martyrdom. That's a gift.

So then we go into Jeremiah 1, 4-5:4 "Before I formed you in your mother's womb I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations." God wasn't just talking to Jeremiah. He was talking to all of us. We are all called to be prophets, meaning teacher, bringing the Good News. Aren't we all called to bring the Good News? Many times they don't understand that their life is consecrated as a child of God. Isaiah 49,1: "The Lord called me from birth. From my mother's womb He gave me my name." Now if all this be true that we have been known and loved in the mind and heart of God from all eternity and through all eternity, then it must also be true for all those little lives who have just begun their lives in their mother's womb. It has to be true for them, it's true for us. They're making that connection there between the unborn and the born.

Now in the next section, I talk about God's intense love for each of us individually, Isaiah 49, 15-16:" Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the child of her womb? Even if a mother were to forget her child, I will never forget you. Look, I have carved your name on the palm of my hand." Now in this section I lead into self esteem. That's a good buzz word. You all know this, right? The minute you say to the parents that you're going to be teaching self esteem, they go "yes." Thank God she's teaching self esteem. But you see I don't teach it the way the world teaches it. The world teaches self esteem as self fulfillment. You just grab as much as you can in the way of material things, and as much in the way of power, education even, so you can achieve power. Grab as much as you can, and you will be happy, you will be fulfilled. Wrong. I teach it the way Jesus would teach it. You want to find yourself? You lose yourself. That's the way you have high self esteem.

I have a virtue paper, and I explain what a virtue is. You know God didn't say -- create us out of love-- and say, good luck you little mortals, hope you make it home. Right? He infused in our souls the virtues. I love this quote of St. Augustine, is at the top of my virtue paper:" To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances; to seek Him, the greatest adventure; to find Him, the greatest human achievement." You want to be great, I tell them, you want the formula for greatness? And these little souls raise their hands. They want to be great. Who doesn't want to be great? Right, Father? Well, he is great. He knows what I'm talking about. You want to be great? The formula for greatness is this: Love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and your whole strength. So I teach them how to develop virtue. And we go through all the virtues, the cardinal virtues, theological virtues, of course; then we do the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit. And I'll go around the classroom like a whirlwind and the kids will all take a turn reading one of these things. The classroom once again comes alive because my next question to them is this, in order to build their self esteem. What virtue, or gift, or fruit do you feel that you have cultivated to a great extent? And I love when an eighth grade boy will say wisdom. And he may very well be very wise. No? So I want them to see that in order to be happy with yourself and with your world, we must be holy. You will never be happy if you are not holy, if you are not living according to God's plan for love and life. Helping yourself, with the grace of God of course, to cultivate the virtues in your soul. That's the way you will have high self esteem. Now sometimes when I'm teaching this, and of course the final focus is on chastity, that will be the last few hours of the last day depending on how I do this in the school.

Another fact about self esteem, it comes from three sources, but only one is valid. Our self concepts can come from how other people, our family, our friends, or even our enemies, see us, God help us. That's not really valid. They don't know us, sometimes. Our self concept can come from how we see ourselves, but especially as an adolescent, many adolescents will look in the mirror and go "ugh." Its an age when they don't always see how beautiful they are. So that's not always a valid concept of our self esteem -- self concept. But our self concept can come from someone who knows us better than our family and our friends. God thinks we are worthwhile. And I tell them this story about an auctioneer who was auctioning off people. Have you heard this one? No? OK. There was an auctioneer and there was a whole stage full of people. And he's saying, "Going once, going twice," and suddenly Satan stood up, and he said, "I want to make a bid for those people." He said, "I will promise them all the power and the pleasure and the money and the beauties of this world, if I can only but have their souls." And the auctioneer said, "Not bad, going once, going twice," and suddenly an amazing man walked into the room. And he said, "I would like to make a bid and I don't think anyone can top this bid. I would like to give up my life for them." They all looked at each other and the auctioneer said, "Going once, going twice, sold, to Jesus Christ, your Creator and Redeemer." He is the true source of our self esteem. How much God loves you! How valuable you are in the sight of God! Many times they have never been taught this. I know many adults that have never been taught this. So after we discuss that and we discuss virtues, then I ask them to look at their friend next to them. You see what I'm doing. I'm not focusing so much on talent because I realized, and I learned this from experience, that the ones who are not great athletes or cheerleaders or something like that don't feel very valuable sometime. So I would rather not focus on those sorts of things, even those are certain talents and gifts, certainly from God. I would rather focus on virtue. So I will say to them, look at your neighbor next to you. Now I would like you to tell everyone what virtue this person possesses that you see in them. This is very beautiful. And this even brings tears to the eyes of eighth graders, because they will look at each other and they'll say I didn't know you knew I had that, or you know, something like that. It's really a very beautiful thing, very, very beautiful. Then we go on.

Zachariah 2,8: "For He who touches you, touches the apple of my eye." And I say to them, did you know you were the apple of God's eye? We are talking self esteem here, true self esteem. And then I'm leading them in to fetal development. And I will show a beautiful film, "Window to the Womb," Are you familiar with that? Yes, it's beautiful. Ultrasound equipment will show the unborn child in the womb, and they love this. Many high school kids have never seen an ultrasound picture of an unborn baby, or I always try to say thats what you looked like when you were 10 to 12 weeks in the womb. So it's a beautiful thing to teach. And after showing them the unborn child, I have a purpose here of course, we definitely want to bring forth the humanity of the unborn child. This is critical, that we bring forth the humanity of the unborn child, because then I will go into the inhumanity of abortion. Now at one point a few years ago -- I have to tell you this story. One of the eighth grade boys in my class had a little sister with spina bifida. And when the mom, the good Catholic mom, was five months pregnant, she had an ultrasound. Because remember, they had just seen ultrasound. Then I bring in Stacy. Stacy's mom found out at five months in utero that Stacy was going to be born with spina bifida. What do you think the first thing her obstetrician said to her? "You can terminate this pregnancy." Well I had no idea what this good Catholic mom said back to him, but I invited her into the classroom, and I knew Stacy was here. And she said in front of all the kids, "I said to that doctor, your telling me that I can abort my child is like telling me I can take a gun and shoot you." And I'm going "Yes." I had no idea that's what she was going to say. And little Stacy was in her wheelchair, and she was going up and down the aisles and all kids were, touching her on the shoulder, touching her on the head. She's beautiful. She's sharp as a tack. She has ice blue huge eyes, little pink rim glasses. And at one point the mom said, "We don't think that Stacy will ever be able to walk." And I suppose upon hearing that one of my eighth grade boys became a little frustrated, and he stood up and he said, "You mean she's never going to be able to walk?" Well, my heart just dropped, because I thought -- what did this sound like to Stacy, to her mother, and her brother, her eighth grade brother in the back of the room. Just as he said that, her brother hopped out of his desk, went over to his baby sister, and very gently picked her up out of the wheelchair, and just as gently placed her on her tummy on the floor, and he said, "No, but look how she crawls." And she did a GI crawl. All the way up the aisle to my feet, and I picked up this little soul. What a grace filled moment this was. I would give my life to have had that on video. There wasn't a dry eye, and this was an eighth grade classroom. It was such a beautiful, beautiful day. And I was able then to teach what abortion was really like and it became very personal to these children, because they knew Stacy now. And they watched Stacy do that GI crawl up the aisle. They watched how hard she worked, but how strong she was. And I was able to teach them how does love respond to a baby with no legs. I'll be your legs, or I'll do everything possible to get you around. How does love respond to a baby that has no eyes. I'll be your eyes, or I'll teach you how to read braille, whatever it is. It was so cute, towards the end of the week I would say, how does love respond to a baby who has no arms? And the whole class would yell out, I'll be your arms. They're so precious. And then we thanked Stacy and her mom for coming, and they left. And then we talked about the reality of abortion.