Henry Waxman and the Sexualization of our Children

Dear Rep. Waxman,

My congratulations on your reelection to the 11th Congress of the United States and promotion to Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. As a national leader charged with overseeing the improvement of the quality of our air, the safety of our food and drugs, health care, and a growing telecommunications industry, I want to appeal to you on behalf of millions of my peers in their teens and twenties.

You’ve shown yourself to be a leader in education, women’s health research and reproductive rights for my generation. So I cannot help but wonder, why are you consistently supporting policies that are destroying an entire generation of young people my age? Your tireless campaign for abortion on demand and “comprehensive sex education” has contributed to the death of 35 million people during your tenure in the House, not to mention the countless millions of young people that have been emotionally and physically damaged as a result of aborted pregnancies and STIs.

Did you know that this year alone, 3 million of American’s teenagers join the swelling epidemic of over 19 million Americans who will contract one of 25 STIs, including some form of HPV, Chlamydia, and Syphilis? One in five of us will have had sexual intercourse before we are 15, and nearly two-thirds of us by the time we graduate high school. Yet over 90 percent of sexually active youth wish they had waited to have sex.

It’s certainly not for lack of information that this is happening. Quite the opposite. In fact, the only thing keeping pace with the growth in comprehensive sex education in schools has been the amount of sexual content in movies, magazines, on TV and the Internet.

Yet the message we, the youth of America, are constantly receiving, from that first day of sex education in elementary school is that sex is disproportionately important in our lives. More than our intelligence, our athleticism, or our talents, we are told, is our ability to perform sexually or exude sexual appeal. We are taught that because sex at our age is inevitable, the best that can be done is to try and minimize the consequences.

We are not animals subject only to sensual desires or controlled by our hormonal urges. We are a generation of incredibly talented, passionate, intelligent individuals committed to leaving the world a better place, to ending poverty, alleviating suffering and pursuing peace. We are today’s entrepreneurs and tomorrow’s leaders. And we are capable of forfeiting what we want in the moment for what we want most, if we would only be encouraged to do so by people that we admire and those claiming to have our best interests in mind.

Perhaps I misunderstand your intentions and you truly believe you are doing what is best for us by advocating “comprehensive” sex education such as that which has been set forth by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). It stresses teaching 5-8 year olds about masturbation, sexual intercourse and homosexuality. By the time we get to jr. high and high school, we get

to discuss sexual fantasies, oral and anal intercourse and erotic photographs.

Yet the more sex we are exposed to, the more casually it is treated and the more that well-meaning adults such as yourself fail to encourage us to make truly healthy decisions based on all the facts, the greater the risk for us.

On behalf of my peers, whose lives are being destroyed by STIs, unwanted pregnancies and emotional heartache, please stop. Stop your relentless attack against attempts to encourage true sexual responsibility, particularly abstinence. Stop your disproportionate funding of programs and organizations that are doing more to destroy our lives rather than protect them. And stop contributing to the destruction of our futures before we’ve hardly begun to live them.

When you took your oath of office on January 6th, you promised to, “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty for [yourself and your Posterity].” We want to live lives free from sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies that shatter our dreams, free from soul-wounds born out of a “casual encounter,” and free from depression, low self-esteem and thoughts of suicide. We want healthy bodies, healthy relationships and the opportunity to pursue our wildest dreams.

Will you help us?