2004 Voices: Love, Health and Homosexuality

Voices Online Edition
Vol. XIX No. 1 Eastertide 2004
Love, Health and Homosexuality
Up Close and Personal

by Nancy Valko, RN

In just one day recently, I heard it three times. A local columnist, a TV pundit and a San Francisco couple all said that same-sex marriage is not a threat to anyone or any institution. I was immediately taken back to some episodes in my own life.

When I was 15, my favorite person was my grandmother. Feisty and opinionated, she survived both divorce and widowhood to become an independent career woman in the 1950s by selling accessories to clothes designers. She had a soft heart but took great pride — even glee — in her “progressive” views and her inability to be shocked. She always told me that I could ask her anything.

Grandma often took me to lunch with her business friends, many of who were openly homosexual. She especially enjoyed “Bill” and “Mike”, who had been together for many years and were quite charming.

My mother was scandalized and I was a bit confused so one day I asked Grandma exactly how these men could have relations. She thought awhile before finally admitting that she really didn’t know and that she was afraid that if she found out, she wouldn’t like them so much! Her preference for a gauzy acceptance of so-called private choice instead of reality has become endemic today.

I thought about Grandma when I read a nursing journal article about addressing the special health needs of homosexual men and women. The article was certainly supportive of being non-judgmental and sensitive when dealing with a homosexual patient, but the list of unique diseases and social problems associated with active homosexuality was truly staggering.

From the higher risks of physical trauma and domestic abuse to sexually transmitted diseases, certain cancers, substance abuse and so on, it is not surprising that both homosexual men and women are said to have a statistically much shorter lifespan than the rest of the population. Obviously, “safe sex” and blind acceptance are not the answer to the problem of homosexuality, even physically.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND CHILDREN
My son was only 10 when he approached me while I was hurriedly preparing dinner and asked what “gay” meant. Although I carefully tried to monitor what my children watched on TV, there was no way to avoid a promo for an upcoming news story on a roundup of homosexual men at a local park.

When I told my son that I would explain this when he was older, he demanded what he called his constitutional right to know and I gave him as simple an explanation as I could. Luckily, I noticed a strange expression on his face and realized that he was at an age where his best friend was all-important and it wasn’t cool to like girls.

I quickly assured him that he wasn’t “gay” and that his friendship with Andrew was perfectly natural. I also told him that at his age, he wasn’t expected to like girls but that this would change as he grew up. The relief on his face broke my heart for the other children who might be similarly confused and frightened.

A few years later, one of my daughters confided that a sophomore high school friend revealed she was a lesbian (or thought she was). She encouraged my daughter to experiment by saying “How do you know you aren’t gay if you haven’t tried it?”

Despite the protestation of the “gay rights” movement, the “it’s ok to be gay” message that has infiltrated our society tells our children much more about promiscuity and the trivialization of sex than about violence and discrimination.

LOVE AND HOMOSEXUALITY
When “Johnny” was admitted to our oncology unit several years ago with advanced colon cancer, it soon became obvious that there were going to be problems. Besides being young, charming and a talented artist with a terminal disease, Johnny was openly homosexual and loved to aggravate the fundamentalist Christian nurses on our staff.

Over the months of eventually unsuccessful experimental treatments for his cancer, Johnny and I developed a warm relationship and had many discussions about love, life and death. Some of the other nurses felt it was important to lecture Johnny about the sin of homosexuality but I felt it was best to pray for God’s wisdom and guidance in helping Johnny and I let the discussions evolve.

Just before Johnny died, he looked up at me and poignantly asked if God would forgive him. I said “Of course! God loves you and so do I.” His resulting, almost beatific, smile said it all and he peacefully died shortly afterward.

Later, one of my close relatives announced that she was ending her 13-year marriage and that she was a lesbian. The family was shocked and saddened but the consensus was that if this makes “Betty” happy, it must be okay. Political correctness allowed them to ignore an obviously tormented soul who had long been anything but happy.

I talked privately with Betty to let her know that I was concerned and praying for her. Surprisingly, she said that she was actually disappointed by the family’s reaction and admitted that she was in great emotional pain and needed more than just a pat on the head.

DON’T BE SILENT
We make a big mistake if we allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence on the issue of homosexuality. The physical, emotional and spiritual effects of homosexuality are devastating, not only to society but also to actual individuals.

Although self-proclaimed experts in our society tend to characterize any concerns about homosexuality as homophobia and even hate, real love does not require approval of everything a person does but rather a commitment to the true well-being of that person.

Ask any parent. Ask God.

 

2001 Voices: What about “Sex Ed”?

Voices Online Edition
Lent – Easter 2001, Volume XVI, No. 1
What about “Sex Ed”?

by Nancy Valko, RN

As a nurse, I occasionally care for AIDS patients. The hospital requires that I wear gloves, a waterproof gown and goggles if there is any danger that I might be splashed with any bodily fluid from such a patient. Yet we are told that a condom is good protection against AIDS. If that were true, then all I would need to care for an AIDS patient would be a condom.

Ridiculous, of course. But does it really make sense to encourage people to trust their lives to this? Yet, condom use remains the cornerstone of “safe sex” education in most public schools.

Can we really trust the “sexperts”, whose influence has apparently infiltrated into even some Catholic schools?

Reviewing the materials
I live in a rather conservative public school district which says it promotes abstinence for teens while giving balanced factual information. But in reviewing some of the materials, I found that a section on the benefits of birth control was “balanced” only with failure rates (some erroneous) for the various methods. No mention was made of the actions often abortifacient or potential side effects like depression associated with various devices such as the Pill. However, the “rhythm method” was mentioned as particularly ineffective in pregnancy prevention and Natural Family Planning was totally ignored.

In a junior high program, a section on fetal development showed tiny pictures of unborn babies with an accompanying text on what parts of the unborn baby are affected at that stage by birth defects. A story about a woman choosing amniocentesis was the introduction to that chapter. These are just two examples of inaccurate, inadequate or biased information I discovered, but even more frustrating was the school’s response. The principal was polite, respectful and said he would take my comments seriously. Which meant, of course, that nothing changed. Well, actually, one thing has changed over the years: the procedure for getting a child out of a sex education class.

With my first child, a note was sent home with an anti-permission slip to be signed if I did not want my child to participate. I signed it and my son was excused from such classes.

My second child was a bit more rebellious and her anti-permission slip didn’t quite make it back to school. She was halfway through the course when I found out. I was told that I could “home school” the rest of the course using the school’s materials.

With my third child, no permission slip was sent at all and when I called to inquire, the principal called me back. I explained my objections including those based on religious grounds, but was told that I would have to send him a letter to get her excused because a phone call was insufficient. That was junior high.

Now, my daughter is 15 and in high school. I have learned to voice my objections early because sex education is now just part of a family life and health program. By putting drug education, sex education, healthy lifestyles, etc. in one lump course, parents need not be informed about programs to which they might object. Instead, we are encouraged to “share” our views and principles with our children.

It is ironic that one parent offended by a mention of God in a public school invocation can get a school to change its policies, while many parents offended by what is being taught in sex education are ignored.

The sex education monolith
Last year, when Representative Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma and an obstetrician, proposed legislation to require warning labels on condoms because of HPV (human papilloma virus), he was quickly attacked by the American College of Ob-Gyns (ACOG), Planned Parenthood and the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists.

Rep./Dr. Coburn had been fighting for more than a year to make HPV a reportable disease like AIDS and to put warnings on condom packages saying that they offer little or no protection against HPV. A study by the national Center for Disease Control found that the human papilloma virus, the sexually transmitted virus responsible for causing 95% of all cervical cancer cases, is now the “most prevalent” STD.

Yet, in a letter to Congress, the ACOG opposed telling people that condoms don’t work against HPV because such warnings were “not medically appropriate” and “would discourage condom use”.

Discouraging condom use is apparently the ultimate “sin” in sex education, according to these groups. Even if gives our children a false sense of security?

Actually, there is more than one sexually transmitted disease against which condoms offer little or no protection. Even on Planned Parenthood’s website, this fact is acknowledged and the only protection advice offered is to “limit the number of intimate and sexual contacts”. Regarding HPV, Planned Parenthood continues to insist that condoms offer at least some protection and that “few HPV infections (statistically) lead to cervical cancer” anyway. This is a group which states it “wants you to have a happy and healthy sex life”.

Coburn’s legislative proposal, not surprisingly, was defeated. But even though sex education proponents won that skirmish, there are real signs of hope.

The debate about sex education has recently heated up again due to legislation allowing federal and state funds to be used for abstinence-only sex education.

Since 1996, such funding has led to an estimated 3000% increase in abstinence education, which has groups like Planned Parenthood in a tizzy. Abstinence programs have been even been called “dangerous” and “irresponsible” because such groups insist that many if not most teens will have sex anyway and they will be harmed or even die without accurate information about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. But, as I personally found out, giving children “the facts” doesn’t mean giving all the facts.

To counteract the momentum of abstinence education, the new buzz phrase is “comprehensive sex education”, which supposedly can teach both abstinence and “safe sex”. It’s no surprise that most of the major media have taken up the cause and newspaper editorials often cite a recent study purportedly showing that 75% of the parents surveyed wanted “comprehensive” sex education taught in schools.

Few parents themselves are well-informed about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. It is almost impossible to keep up with the constantly increasing amount of information available and be able to separate fact from propaganda. To rely on the media or sex educators to inform our children about sex is ultimately dangerous to their physical health as well as to their emotional and moral health.

Chastity education
Abstinence-only programs are very good as well as surprisingly successful in teaching teens to wait until marriage. But the what is also really needed for our whole society is chastity-based education. Chastity is a life-long decision to use the gift of sexuality wisely. It is based on principles and real goals which apply to everyone-single or married, young or old. The teenage years are an exceptionally difficult time as teens learn about independence, responsibility, impulse control and relationships. It is a time of preparation for a responsible adulthood which usually results in marriage and parenthood.

“Comprehensive” sex education is not really about giving information but rather about a politics of despair where the sex “experts” hope for some damage control in the areas of teen pregnancy and disease. But we are already seeing the failure of such an approach in the proliferation of new sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, divorce, unwed moms, deadbeat dads, child abuse, etc., as well as a growing cynicism about relationships in our young people. If sex is seen as little more than recreation with consequences to be avoided, how will our children later be able to handle the temptation to cheat on a spouse or the sacrifices involved in raising a child?

Despite the challenges of confronting the sex “experts”, we must continue to demand better from our schools-and our society. And we must realize that the most influential sex education tool we can give our children is to be good examples ourselves, whatever our station in life.
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1997 National Catholic Register: Real Love Often Means Just Saying ‘No’

Education

Real Love Often Means Just Saying ‘No’
BY Nancy Guilfoy Valko

January 19-25, 1997 Issue | Posted 1/19/97 at 2:00 PM

Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy by Kristen Luker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996, 283 pp., $24.95)

IT WAS only a few years ago when, locked in curfew combat with a daughter experiencing the “frightful fourteens” (the “terrible twos” times 7), I decided that teenage logic can be an oxymoron. It was only later that my daughter admitted that she not only understood my concerns but also appreciated my strong stand against staying out all night as really a sign of caring.

I thought about this incident as I read Kristen Luker’s new book, Dubious Conceptions: the Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. Luker, a professor of sociology and law at the University of California at Berkeley, explores the topic of teenage pregnancy and concludes that “[t]he short answer to why teenagers get pregnant and especially to why they continue those pregnancies is that a fairly substantial number of them just don’t believe what adults tell them, be it about sex, contraception, marriage or babies.” To effect a change in teen behavior, she suggests that adults must learn to understand the new world “with its radically new circumstances” our teens live in.

Not surprisingly, Luker considers more contraceptive use, more access to abortion and more sex education as the best solutions to the problem of teen pregnancy. Parental involvement seems to be considered helpful only if the parents support all these options.

Luker admits bewilderment about the large numbers of “babies having babies” despite the availability of contraception and abortion and has several of these young mothers tell their stories. The stories are invariably poignant but rarely illuminative and lead to Luker’s new contribution to the controversy: Teen pregnancy is a symptom rather than a cause of poverty. Thus, she maintains, cuts in social welfare programs will cause further misery rather than a change in behavior. “Early child-bearing,” she pronounces, “would decrease if poor teenagers had better schools and safer neighborhoods, and if their mothers and fathers had decent jobs so that teens could afford the luxury of being children for a while longer.”

As the parent of two teens myself (as well as an 11- year-old taking notes on the other two), I was disappointed but not surprised that Luker sees the solutions to the problem of teen pregnancy as political rather than personal. I was also disappointed to see that she only tackled this problem at its endpoint—pregnancy—rather than at the source of the problem: teenage sexual activity.

For many sociologists like Luker, the vast increase in sexual activity among teens is a just a fact. Preventing pregnancy and disease are the only problems considered amenable to intervention. The development of character, particularly the postponing of immediate pleasure for a higher purpose, is considered too moralistic for teens in today’s culture. At best, teens are told to wait “until you are ready” at some vague point in the future but not necessarily until marriage. At worst, teens are told that having sex is a natural part of growing up and nothing to feel guilty about as long as the sex is “responsible,” i.e. protection is used against pregnancy and disease.

Like many parents, I too have been counseled to give my son condoms and my daughter the Pill “before it’s too late.” But I look on my role as reinforcing that small voice of conscience in my children that threatens to be drowned out by our sex-saturated culture as well as by their own hormones. There is no pill for the soul and no condom for the heart.

Books like Dubious Conceptions ultimately fail because the contraceptive mentality and social welfare programs they aggressively promote fail to either satisfy or ennoble. There is a thirst for truth and ideals among the young that is impossible to slake with statistics, polls or social programs.

As a Catholic, I have found not only the words of the Gospel but also the blending of both happiness and celibacy in virtually all of the priests and nuns I have known to be powerful counterpoints to the current culture. I have made sure my children have regular contact with both. The prophetic words of Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae have inspired me in both single and married life and I try to impart this wisdom to my own teens. Human love is both a mystery and a gift. To reduce this to mere sex does a real disservice to all of us, no matter what stage of life we may be in currently.

But will teens listen? As I have found, teenagers tend to fight with parents on everything: curfews, clothes, friends, and of course sex. They want to make their own decisions and even their own mistakes. But disagreements are testing grounds, not failures. And, as I have found, teens secretly appreciate adults who care enough not to give up.

In the end, exhaustive sociological studies like Dubious Conceptions will remain popular but it does not take a Ph.D. to recognize that real love often means just saying “No.”

Nancy Valko, R.N. is based in St. Louis, Mo.
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