Facts Might Change, But We Often Don’t

What is true is constantly changing.  When I was in high school, my science text book stated unequivocally that the entire universe consisted of 16 galaxies.  Period.  Now, a half century later, we do not know how many galaxies there are.  Because there are so many.  NASA estimates there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.  There are so many we don’t even have the capability to count them all.

Facts change.  In an interesting book about this, “The Half-Life of Facts,” Samual Arbesman observes that while the facts change, we often don’t.  Arbesman writes, “(e)ven if we are confronted with facts that should cause us to update our understanding of the way the world works, we often neglect to do so.  We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.”

In other words, we tend to believe what we already believe.  And too often we double down on what we believe, on what we know to be true, even when it isn’t.

The Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teachers Network (now known as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network—GLSEN) was founded in 1990 by Kevin Jennings.  The organization’s stated mission is to eliminate discrimination, harassment and bullying of LGBT students in grades K-12, and it is carried out by forming Gay Straight Alliances in our schools.  A seemingly noble mission.  Reportedly there are now 3,600 such alliances operating throughout the U.S.

In addition to teaching that children are born homosexual, or at least born with a homosexual orientation or identity (actually the explanation is much more complicated than that but I’m not going to get all twisted in knots trying to explain the multitude of nuances), GLSEN also tries to advance understanding of non-traditional sexual practices.  They, too, teach children how to engage in non-traditional sexual practices “safely” (as though that’s possible).  Apparently this is supposed to desensitize other children to practices that may seem alien to them.  If children understand each others’ sexual activities, they are less likely to harass and discriminate and bully them, or so they claim.

Personally, I don’t buy any of this.  I can’t prove it yet, but the whole operation seems like a massive effort to sexualize children and groom as many of them as possible into a homosexual lifestyle.  A study just published in December last year by the Archives of Sexual Behavior gives some support to my theory.  Researchers Ritch C. Savin-Williams and Kara Joyner found that 70% of adolescents who identified as homosexual claimed years later that they were exclusively heterosexual.  As teens they were “homosexual” but as adults they were straight.  These researchers hypothesized that the change was due to one of three possible reasons:

1.       As adults these gays went into the closet to hide their real orientation

2.       As adolescents these adults were confused about what it meant to be homosexually oriented

3.       The adolescents who claimed they were homosexual were just trying to fool the researchers asking the questions, that is, they were “jokesters”

 (See The Dubious Assessment of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Adolescents of Add Health, by Ritch C. Savin-Williams and Kara Joyner, Archives of Sexual Behavior, published online December 24, 2013)

Some of these explanations might be possible, but I remind you these conclusions are speculative.  Noticeably missing is the possibility that, as adolescents, these children were sexually exploited by more savvy sexual predators who got them to actively engage in homosexual sex.  I’ve seen plenty of examples of that kind of exploitation.  Admittedly, my observations are anecdotal, but as an investigator I have a lot of them.

In our effort to avoid being called homophobic, Americans by the millions embraced GLSEN and other groups like them.  We have expanded sex education programs in schools.  We have endorsed sex education materials that incorporate hard core pornography.  We have stocked school library shelves with gay and straight romantic novels littered with pornographic narratives.  We have encouraged children to attend organized obscenities masquerading as gay pride parades.  Because we’re tolerant.  Because we’re edgy.

The heterosexual crowds have piled onto this band wagon, too.  Yes, more sex education!  Let’s teach children how to engage in all manner of sex, let them decide what they want to do.  We don’t need any more of that Victorian moralizing.  Kinsey’s freed us.  We’re enlightened now.  Children should be encouraged to get it on with whomever and whenever they want and at whatever age.  We’ll have healthier children.  Planned Parenthood says so.  These kids are going to have sex anyway, we need to teach them how to hook up safely and how to avoid getting pregnant.  Or so they say.

It isn’t working the way people who would like us to think they had good intentions expected.  In the last 20 years our culture has gone from sexualized to hypersexualized.  Pornography is everywhere and children are becoming addicted to it at earlier and earlier ages, as young as 9 or 10.  Some middle school girls are becoming pregnant and some middle school boys are becoming hard core sexual predators.  Oh, and the bullying and harassment is still going strong; and more than 30 years ago Kinsey’s findings were proven to have been not only wrong, but fraudulent.  What we thought were facts, weren’t.  No, those with good intentions have not won the day.  But for those with evil intent, it’s working better than they had hoped.  Children are more vulnerable today to exploitation by sexual predators than they ever have been since our country was founded.

We need to do something different.  How about we start by once again protecting the innocence of children?  How about we once again hold that up as a value and organize our educational system around that?

Some facts don’t change.  One of them is that childhood innocence should be protected at all costs.