Policy for the Masses

When I was growing up in  Scotland in the late 1940s, there was no such thing as sex. The cold grey hand of Calvinist morality (“If it’s fun, it must be sin”) still kept its clammy grip on society’s shoulder. In my home and in the classroom, the topic of sex was strictly verboten. Like other little boys, I got my sex education in random, very unreliable dribs and drabs.

When I was six or seven, our neighbourhood gang of pre-pubertal boys built a gang hut on a piece of waste ground.

One day, a couple of girls were persuaded to enter our hut, roll down their knickers and reveal their mysteries. Unfortunately, a woman at her window high up in a nearby tenement was watching and knew we were up to something unspeakably filthy and disgusting. She must have called the cops.

A policeman arrived – the angriest cop I’ve ever seen. Apparently he thought he had happened upon Sodom and Gomorrah and he was God’s chosen instrument to smite fear into us sinners. At first, he tried to rip our hut apart with his bare hands, but it was solidly nailed  together. So he took out his truncheon (the British copper’s wonderfully phallic cudgel), and proceeded to demolish our hut. He was like a man possessed. His face was red and pouring with sweat, and his  truncheon-phallus was chipped and dented, but moral law had been restored in the universe. Clearly, whatever naughty thing we had been doing was far more evil than we had ever suspected.

When I was seven or eight, another boy and I spent a long time speculating, in the most bizarre detail, what we were supposed to do with (or, more accurately, to) girls. But afterwards, we still didn’t have a clue.

In my early teens, I shared the same bed with my older and younger brothers. One morning, when I was 13 or 14, I awoke to find my pajama pants sodden with this slimy goo. I couldn’t understand what had happened to me. It happened again and again. My mother must have known, but nothing was ever said.

Looking back now across a void of 60 years or so, I can scarcely recognize the little boy that was me, and when I do look back it all seems the stuff of comedy. But at the time, the sheer incomprehensibility of sex, its mysteries and taboos, weren’t funny at all. Charlie Chaplin got it exactly right: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Wouldn’t it have been great if some informed adult had explained the facts of life to me?

Recently, Ontario’s Minister of Education introduced a revised sex education curriculum for our schools. The curriculum seems eminently sensible and useful. It favours light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, tolerance over prejudice. It would help kids.

Inevitably, conservative religious groups protested, and Premier McGuinty immediately withdrew the proposal.

Religious conservatives believe their scriptures are the words of their god, or are “divinely inspired.” But there’s no reason to believe that these ancient scriptures are anything other than the writings of spectacularly ill-informed, rather unpleasant men who treated women like dirt and children as mere possessions. And because people always create gods in their own image, it’s not surprising their god is an ill-tempered, cruel misogynistic bully with lots of sexual problems. And yet we still give some special credence or respect to the writings of people who knew almost nothing about almost everything. Why? Apart from a few good stories, the Old Testament is little more than a giant compendium of claptrap, racism, misogyny, and cruelty. It’s inspired only in offering perfect examples of how people should not treat other people. In the New Testament, Jesus – at least as represented – is a fascinating, admirable person, but all the magical stuff – the virgin birth, the angels, the miracles, the resurrection – is pure twaddle.

Of course, people have the right to believe in twaddle, and even twaddle believers obviously have the right to make their views known to government. But a modern secular state should not be making education policy to please twaddle lovers.