Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness In A Sex Ed Class

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
~Deuteronomy 5:20, The Nineth Commandment

I last wrote about the separation of Church and State eight months ago, and I wondered then whether Singapore would see a similar 'intrusion' of faith into the public space as what's happening in the States and to a less extent Australia. It now looks like this might indeed happening, but probably few people are aware of it.

So it started with this person who posted a thread at the SPUG forums on what he experienced at a 'brain-washing' sex education workshop in school. I thought at first it's just one of those interesting ad-hoc workshops that are organised for students in junior college and secondary schools. But as I continued reading, I was quite shocked to find that these types of workshops were organised by religious groups such as a local affiliation of James Dobson's Focus On The Family. Did the Ministry know about the background of these groups? Maybe not. There's not one mention of religious affiliation at Focus' local website. It's not unreasonable for the folks at the Ministry of Education to not know what their activities are if they don't follow US politics.

But there's more; it became apparent that some of the ideas presented at the workshops such as those conducted by the Catholic group Family Life Society, were quite disturbing. Among other things, students learnt that condoms are not effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases because the size of the virus is smaller than the holes in the material used to manufacture condoms.

It took me 10 seconds to go to Columbia Uni's Ask Alice service to verify this claim. The thing they taught in the workshop was absolute hogwash. I was furious to later find that this sort of misinformation had been around since 2003 when the Vatican said basically the same thing, which was later condemned by UNAids. The FDA has more information about condoms.

Was this an honest mistake? How could they lie to people about such things? I couldn't believe it! But then I remembered, if it's possible to adopt and market the same 'faith-based' community way of thinking that the political right wingers have so successfully done in the US, it's not that unreasonable for this fiasco to have occurred in Singapore! If you have one (inaccurate) research paper that talks about the size of virus molecules, it can easily be used to justify the argument despite the objections of health-care professionals. I'm thinking the rationale might work like this: Hey, we have this paper that tell us that condoms don't work in preventing STDs. We know that some doctors oppose this, but I think we should go ahead and promote this idea because we don't allow the use of condoms anyway. Yes, we might be misleading people, but it's all in the name of doing God's good work. And ultimately, we're saving lives if we scare people enough.

Now, if this is indeed the rationale for gross misinformation to appear in the workshop, we really have an urgent and serious problem on our hands. The issue is far bigger than the original objection of faith-based groups teaching secular topics in public schools because it's become a matter of life and death. Why? Because this issue is really about trust.

Who should young people turn to for accurate information on sexuality? We hope their teachers and folks who conduct sex ed workshops are their first source of information. Here's the rub: what happens when these young people later learn they have been misled and lied to, and have not been given objective information? You would lose their trust, probably immediately. Young people are not stupid. They'll eventually know whether their mentors are honest with them or not.

I can easily imagine the following scenario. A young woman drops her blouse before a young, keen, male person. He's considering whether to take the next step. He remembers what his sex ed educator told him, and how some parts of the lesson are just not true. He says to himself, 'If his information about the virus molecule size is not correct, maybe other things he told us isn't really true too. He did tell us that the only 100% way of preventing STD is abstinence. Oh what the heck, I think he's just exaggerating, these guys always have a religious agenda, I don't trust him at all. What are the chances of getting infected after just one time? Screw it...'

This guy gets infected with the HIV virus as a result. Too bad the misleading person who did the workshop happened to be right about the abstinence thing. Anyway, I'd present the lesson this way: condoms are effective against STDs (except for use during anal sex). However, there are such things as failure rates due to operator and manufacturing error. Therefore, to be 100% safe, practise abstinence. If that's not an appropriate choice, know the risks of condom use; the risks can be very high if they aren't used properly...

More from Tomorrow.sg, and Han who has scanned pages from the materials used at the workshop. It's quite unbelievable...