Sir, - If our politicians and bureaucrats had deliberately conspired to rob the youth of their innocence they couldn't have devised a means better adapted to this purpose than the programme of Relationships and Sexuality Education. Ensnared by a ubiquitous sex-addicted culture and driven by an equally pervasive contraceptive mentality which feeds this culture and is fed by it, they have lost all sense of the beauty of childhood innocence and the meaning and value of the virtues of modesty, purity and chastity.
Even if the programme were morally right per se, it would still be morally wrong for schools. There is no right way to give explicit sex education in a classroom setting. Boys cannot be taught to discuss their own sexual make-up as dispassionately as they would to discuss the components of a computer or the machinery of a motor-car. Sex is an intensely turbulent power and to risk arousing it prematurely can be a dangerous and destructive business.
But in fact the programme is morally fatally flawed. It is based on the relativist premise that there is no objective or absolute right or wrong. Everything depends on the disposition of the subject and the truth is what appears true to the individual. Values clarification - techniques by which the pupils are encouraged to become the agents and authors of their own values - is the very embodiment of this false ideology. This decision-making methodology - central to the programme - is cheating our children of the certitudes, security and stability which a formation in the moral law alone can give - the law of love as the expression of the way of life seen as best for us by a loving Creator.
It is therefore a matter of the utmost urgency that parents, teachers and all concerned for the welfare of our youth should mount a concerted campaign to prevent this Godless programme from being foisted on our schools. Otherwise the products of this Sex-Ed, our future citizens, will flounder in the cesspool of unchastity which is polluting our cultural and spiritual environment. - Yours, etc., Michael Tobin L.P.S.I.,
Dysart Grove, Youghal, Co Cork.