'JUST SAY NO' POLICY A FAILURE

By Bob Newland, publisher of the online and print magazine Hemphasis.net
from his home near Hermosa.

HERMOSA - "Christianity," as practiced by many who proclaim themselves
"Christians" loudly, publicly and repeatedly, often resembles "Democratism"
or "Republicanism," as often practiced by vociferous endorsers thereof. The
dogma they promote frequently has little to do with the party platform. Bob
Ellis' attack on Sam Hurst's observations (Journal Forum, Oct. 30) fits
this pattern.

Jesus' life was a model of careful consideration of the human condition,
characterized by thoughtful advice. I submit, "Let he who is without sin
cast the first stone," as an example. Additionally, Jesus, aware of Hosea's
Old Testament lament, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,"
advised the acquisition of knowledge, especially that knowledge available
through observation of nature and man.

To tell someone something is one thing, to teach them something is another.
In the course of sophomoric assaults on Hurst, Ellis teaches us only that
he dislikes Hurst and his conclusions. Ellis gives us no reason to agree
with his own philosophy, other than his empirically unsupportable
theological conclusions.

It's obvious from Ellis's own statistics that, if our goal is to prevent
unwed pregnancies, we're on an error-rutted road. Ellis provides no
evidence that telling kids more often to "just keep it zipped up" will
provide any better results than what we've achieved. In fact, the one
real-life illustration he presents proves, if anything, the opposite of
what Ellis suggests.

He says, "We teach our children to 'just say no' to drugs; is it so
inconceivable that they could 'just say no' to premarital sex?"

Since the bulimic Nancy Reagan helped establish the moronic "Just Say No"
slogan as a national battle cry to protect us from indiscriminate use of
God-given herbal remedies, adolescent psychotropic drug use (both illicit
and legal) has increased and the average age of first drug use (both
illicit and legal) has steadily decreased. Telling people to blindly say
"no" is different from teaching them why and when to say "no" and to what,
exactly, they are saying "no." The drug "problem," similar to the sex
"problem," increases in complexity as children watch adults act in manners
contrary to their own admonitions.

Ellis's reasoning is right in step with Rep. Stan Adelstein's, who said
publicly, "I know the marijuana laws work, because only one of my three
sons smoked marijuana." In other words, both Ellis and Adelstein, stuck in
a mindlessly dogmatic pothole, use the evidence of failure as reason to
proceed with the policy that produced the failure.

The Family Policy Council, for which Ellis advocates locally, consistently
supports politicians whose collectivist programs reward behavior the
council nominally decries. Drug law policy is a starkly visible, but
certainly not lonely, example. The hypocrisy exhibited by the Family Policy
Council and those political power-mongers for whom it advocates is at least
as much to blame for confusion among youth as is the secular approach
others prefer.

The entire body of human history teaches (there's that word again) us that
many young people in every successive generation will have sex outside of
marriage in contravention of advice they have been given by their elders.
Ellis suggests that knowledge of how to mitigate the potential and real
damage done by a certain percentage of those sex acts should be denied.

This approach is similar to that taken by the most clamorous adherents of
the criminal-manufacturing (sometimes cynically referred to as
"law-and-order") factions of the Democrat or Republican parties. As Ellis
puts it, "Rather than teach someone how to minimize the consequences of a
bad decision, maybe it's better to teach them to make the right decision."

Yes, of course we should do what we can to provide the knowledge of why one
should make the right initial decision - about anything - but to tell
someone to avoid touching a hot stove without also teaching him how to
treat burns is simply irresponsible. Actually, it's beyond
irresponsibility, it's malicious cruelty and raving lunacy.

God provides us with all the tools necessary to know what we need to know,
including examples all around us of what happens when we violate the simple
laws He has also given us. Those examples are no less important than the
laws themselves. If it were not so, God would not provide them.

Ellis does real Christianity, as well as the discussion of how to
beneficially influence human behavior, no favor by using failure to justify
having taken and continuing along the path that produced the failure. He
(and Hurst and I, for that matter) can better serve our constituencies by
quietly providing examples that shine brightly enough to be beacons others
will follow eagerly.