ot healthy for a human being to think their inherent sexual feelings are scourge to be wiped out. The psychological damage caused by this is so detrimental to a person, that some members of religions with particularly severe beliefs about sexuality have been known to commit suicide out of self-disgust. Although this is an extreme, "without sexuality education, many people will likely continue to feel badly about their own sexuality and about sexuality in general" (Elia). These negative feelings will stay with them even after marriage, when they are finally "allowed" to have sex. Secretly, this may be the goal of some abstinence programs where many of the lecturers have had terrible, horrifying, and painful sexual experiences, forever perverting their view of sex. Sex is not a tragedy within the majority of persons' lives. Sexuality is not a pollutant, and people are not to be cleansed of it as such. Trinchieri 15Most people are sexual. It is wrong for abstinence proponents to tell people, regardless of their age, to expulse these feelings. For many people abstinence is simply not a reasonable request, like the family doctor requesting you remove cheese from your diet. Sexuality is inborn. People say that adolescents are not or should not be sexual, but holding hands, hugging, kissing, and even being attracted to (having a "crush" on) somebody are all sexual behaviors and are all behaviors common to adolescents, and even children. Influential child behaviorist B.D. Schmitt explains that, "By age 4, most children develop a healthy sexual curiosity. In normal sexual development between ages 3 and 5, children commonly undress together and look at each other's genitals". With such child sex play prevalent and expected, why do we demand that upon reaching puberty, the most sexually preoccupied time of a person's life, all sexuality should cease? It is mystifying that there are those who would support this backward principle, w...
