Contemplating AOUM education in these Untied States

At its core, sexual education as we know it today is completely gender biased (Levine, 2003). Its fledgling roots date back to the monumental 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade. While the research guiding this is examination not specifically about abortion and privacy, the background of the fateful SCOTUS decision is examined, as its far-reaching implications are directly connected to [STDs] and [their] continuing spread. In a fuller context, the battle of sexual education was won by the far-right neoconservative christian coalitions - whose aims were specfically to end the two "moral scourges" of teen sex and abortion. Jeremiah Denton, the founder of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), in 1981, proposed the idea of ending teen sexual activity through nothing short of propaganda. Gaining credence by attaining support from Orrin Hatch as a co-sponsor, the war to undo Roe v. Wade took on new proportions. Through pernicious means, these two founders - religious and political - created a wave that served to undermine and circumvent the national foundational principle of the Wall of Separation, employing tactics that American leadership excoriated in other totalitarian regimes in other parts of the world. Orwellian maneuvering was not beneath these practices, and during an era of rising media establishment, they were able to subvert majority opinion by way of mass marketing a singular idea in multiple forms, while simultaneously silencing the very word, "abortion" from being spoken in classrooms and even within popular culture (mainstream) media (Levine, 2003; Douglas & Michaels, 2005). Although the surface intentions were noble (reducing unplanned pregnancies and STDs), the more insidious messages were predominately aimed at women, since women are the half of the population that can become impregnated. Further, an arguable premise is more deeply ingrained than overturning Roe V. Wade - the desire to end altogether contraceptive measures. Based in both Catholic and Protestant traditions is the notion that the advent of the birth control pill was the "downfall of morality" in the United States - despite countering arguments that its advent served to level the proverbial playing field of the genders, creating gender equality on a sexual plane.

Ironically, the context of deBeauvoir's mentioning of the absence in literature of any specific point of origin of female oppression rings closely of the Eve v. Lilith arguments, which holds entrenched roots in Christian doctrine advocated by religious leaders who hold such sway in AOUM education legislation. The "sin" of Eve was not that she disobeyed, but that she gained knowledge from the "forbidden fruit", and then gave that knowledge to Adam. Further, as the story goes, they realized they were unclothed, and they hid in shame (Gen. 3). Like the biblical story notes, the Tree of Knowledge admonition from God was that were Eden's denizens to eat of the forbidden fruit, they would die, so goes the subject of sexual education today that is fear-based, using failure rates of contraception - up to and including death. This passage from Genesis is an epicentral belief of the biblical literalist neoconservative Christians who seek to be the driving force of sexual education - consigning all women not back to the romanticized reminiscences of a supposedly simpler time of the 1950s, but straight back to the Stone Age.