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| The Government Needs To Back Off Of Our Personal Lives | ||||||
| Is it just me, or does it seem that lately the government has been concerned with issues that really do not concern it? I don't know if this is because it is an election year or what, but it is really starting to get annoying. | ||||||
| It is times like these that make me really wonder what political party I associate myself most with. As far as foreign policy and protecting our country goes, I am perfectly in agreement with Republicans and the Bush administration, and I think the Patriot Act is a good thing. What I don't think is a good thing, however, is the increasing focus by the government on issues like gay marriage, policing the airwaves, and teaching abstinence in school in lieu of safe sex practices. | ||||||
| First of all, why does the government care who marries who? In fact, why does this matter to anyone? If two men or women want to get married and see how miserable it is, by all means let us allow them to! On Feb. 12, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom approved issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, sending them flocking to the city from all over the country to take advantage of the situation; since then, however, President Bush has urged Congress to back an amendment to the Constitution that would ban gay marriages altogether. | ||||||
| Doesn't this sound awfully similar to the circumstances that prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case Loving vs. Virginia back in 1967, when an interracial couple challenged a state law that said that they could not be married solely because of their different races? The court ruled this law unconstitutional in which proved to be a very controversial decision, but the court made the right choice. Now we are discriminating against same-sex couples, something that seems like a step backwards. Can somebody explain the government's flawed reasoning to me? | ||||||
| Another thing the government needs to stop advocating is the proposition to teach abstinence in school instead of the practice of safe sex. In his January State of the Union address, President Bush said, "We will double federal funding for abstinence programs, so schools can teach this fact of life: Abstinence for young people is the only certain way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases." According to an Associated Press report, increasing abstinence-only sex education would cost the government $270-million per year, which is $170-million more than what it currently spends annually. | ||||||
| This plan seems completely ludicrous, does it not? Shouldn't we teach kids about how to practice safe sex using condoms and other birth control methods rather than just instructing them to not have sex at all? Simply telling a middle- or high-schooler not to have sex is absurd on so many levels: for one thing, they will have sex regardless; for another, hormones are already racing through their bodies like lions to a dead carcass, which just increases the likelihood of young people having sex. My advice to the government: keep the $170-million for a rainy day and leave sex education the way it is now. After all, didn't someone great once say, "Let them have sex!"? | ||||||
| The government needs to get out of our personal lives and focus on what matters: the fact that there are people in this world that want to kill us simply for being Americans. This should take precedence over everything and should be one of the government's sole focuses at all times, during war or peace. When are the officials in Washington, D.C., going to realize this? | ||||||
| Copyright Gerry Wachovsky, 2004, and Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. | ||||||
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