We live in a culture strangely bottled up when it comes to sex. Despite the omnipresence of nudity on television and porn on the Internet, people are just uncomfortable with the topic.

The reticence that some feel was revealed last winter when Jim Douglas made a highly publicized decision to remove the lamp that had adorned the governor’s desk for many years. The lamp’s base was a replica of a famous statue by the nineteenth century Vermont sculptor Hiram Powers, depicting an unrobed Greek girl, sold in bondage to the Turks, and titled "The Slave." Power’s work, created in 1843, became a powerful symbol for Vermont’s abolitionist movement–a proud part of our history, one might think. But in explaining the decision to remove the statue, a spokesman for the Governor worried aloud what might happen if school children chanced to see a naked woman on a field trip to the chief executive’s office. How would you explain that to a third-grader, he wondered aloud. I suppose you might tell an eight-year-old that nudes have been painted and sculpted by artists for hundreds of years because the anatomy of the human form is considered one of the most beautiful creations of nature. You could tell a child that your body is your most precious possession, and that this sculpture was made to teach us that no one’s body should ever be sold or degraded or abused by another person. Bodies are certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and neither are artworks or historic artifacts that depict them. But with so many teachable moments there, I’m afraid the Governor’s Office may have inadvertently sent out a bad lesson for any child old enough to watch the evening news, that breasts are dirty and bodies are nasty and that anything remotely connected with the unmentionable topic of s-e-x must be kept hidden from view and especially hidden from kids.

This attitude may seem like a throwback in an era when sex is everywhere and has never been so blatant, from personal ads seeking every possible permutation to rap lyrics replete with four-letter words on the radio to ads for Viagra on the airwaves morning, noon, and night. But you don’t have to be a reactionary to feel repulsed. Twenty-five years ago, columnist Ellen Goodman was complaining about kidporn, like commercials for Calvin Klein that zoomed in on the crotch of a fifteen year old Brooke Shields, cooing "If my jeans could talk, I’d be in trouble." "Once upon a time,"

Goodman wrote, "it was only card-carrying members of the Legion of Decency who went around sputtering words like ‘disgusting,’ ‘obscene,’ and ‘indecent.’ But once upon a time, a prude was someone who knitted clothes for dogs." Way back at the beginning of her career as a journalist, she was already feeling like a little old lady in tennis shoes, and what she hated most was the way the R-rated media reveled in bumps and grinds and the act of "doing it" with so little mention of kindness, or responsibility, or even sensuality. In the intervening quarter-century, of course, things have only gotten worse. Now parents have AIDS to worry about. And in addition to everywhere else, there are chat rooms and online sex to keep us awake at night. I think parents of all political persuasions are agreed they don’t want their kids getting their values education from MTV. It’s no joke that a conservative might best be defined as a liberal with a teenage daughter.

Parenting has never been easy, but in the past, mothers and fathers could at least count on the support of the surrounding culture in rearing their offspring. Now more and more we’re raising kids in spite of and in opposition to the prevailing social climate. Parents have always had the responsibility of saying "no." But never before has there been so much to say "no" to.

The result, unfortunately, has been that more and more people seem to believe that "just saying no" is all that’s required to counter the crud that rampant in popular culture and all that’s needed to guide young people on the complex path of growing up. "Just saying no" hasn’t been notably effective in the drug wars, and some have pointed out that it didn’t work very well in the Garden of Eden, either. But saying No has nevertheless become the mantra of our nation’s approach to sex education. Public schools now routinely censor textbooks, fail to teach students about contraception or safe sex, and provide alarmist distortions about masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion, all based on the theory that learning the facts of life, like seeing a statue of a naked lady, might give young people funny ideas.

The policy of our federal government is to fund programs that teach "abstinence only." Once kids understand that sex outside of marriage is wrong, according to this pedagogical principle, they’ve learned everything they need to know. It started back in 1981 with the Adolescent Family Life Act, also called the "chastity bill," introduced by a Republican senator from Alabama named Jeremiah Denton, which funneled millions of taxpayer dollars away from groups like Planned Parenthood and into the development of church-sponsored curricula with names like Sex Respect and Teen Aid that were designed to help adolescents resist temptation, with a good scare thrown in. Here, according to Sex Respect, are a few of the hazards of non-marital sex:

Pregnancy, AIDS, guilt, herpes, disappointing parents, chlamydia, inability to concentrate on school, syphilis, embarrassment, abortion, shotgun wedding, gonorrhea, selfishness, pelvic inflammatory disease, heartbreak, infertility, loneliness, cervical cancer, poverty, loss of self-esteem, loss of reputation, being used, suicide, substance abuse, melancholy, loss of faith, possessiveness, diminished ability to communicate, isolation, fewer friendships formed, rebellion against familial standards, alienation, loss of self-mastery, distrust of other sex, viewing others as sex objects, difficulty with long term commitments, various other sexually transmitted diseases, aggression toward women, ectopic pregnancy, sexual violence, loss of sense of responsibility toward others, loss of honesty, jealousy, depression, death.

At least they don’t say it will grow hair on your hands or make you go blind (but it’s close). One pro-abstinence program packs no less than seventy-five full color slides of diseased genitals, and in the film No Second Chance, when a student asks the school nurse the simple question, "What if I want to have sex before I get married?" the answer is "Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die."

AFLA, the Adolescent Family Life Act, got a major boost in 1996, when Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that included a provision making "abstinence only" the law of the land. Since then, over a billion of our tax dollars have been spent to push messages of self-restraint in the public schools. The problem is that they don’t work. Kids who pledge to remain chaste until marriage are just as likely as others to engage in intercourse, only far less likely to use prevention. Pregnancy rates in Europe, where sex ed starts early and condoms are readily available in vending machines, are only a quarter those in the United States. A congressional report last year found that gross inaccuracies were being spread in the classroom through these pro-abstinence programs, like the notion that HIV is transmitted by sweat or tears or that just touching another person’s private parts can cause pregnancy. "Abstinence only" is religious propaganda masquerading as sex education, and its victims are a whole generation of children growing up in ignorance and fear. It’s appeal is to the good old days--which really weren’t so good.

Recently, I saw the movie Kinsey. Maybe some of you saw it, too. It’s about the famous sex researcher from the University of Indiana whose reports on human sexuality shocked Americans when they were first released back in the early 1950’s. The director obviously had mixed feelings about his subject. On the one hand, Kinsey was a bit of a jerk, so enamored with the "scientific" approach he pioneered that he seemed to forget that people might get hurt when his research turned into anything-goes sexual experimentation. One the other hand, Kinsey is also portrayed as a liberator, enabling people to talk about intimacy for the first time and break through the conspiracy of shame and silence that had enveloped whatever happened in the bedroom. One woman who discovers that she’s a lesbian after decades trapped in the wrong identity says to Dr. Kinsey, "you literally saved me," thanking him for giving her the courage to express her feelings and find the love of her life.

No one wants to go back to those bad old days when gays were closeted and Boy Scouts took hip baths to refrain from self-abuse, and fortunately, Unitarian Universalists have a better idea. My fifteen year old daughter Holly pretty much summed up our philosophy on the matter when I asked her, in preparing for this sermon, what she thought kids ought to learn about sex. Her response: "Everything they want to know, when they want to know it." Questions are good. Information is vital. Sexual freedom and sexual responsibility go hand in hand. That’s the premise of Our Whole Lives.

OWL recognizes that sexuality is an integral part of who we are at every stage of the life cycle, and that learning about it is a natural part of learning about life. For younger children--say, those still playing with Barbies (or playing "doctor")--that might mean building a positive body image or learning about good and bad touch. Children in fourth through sixth grades are nearing puberty, where young people’s concerns frequently focus around the question, "Am I normal?" We teach that everyone’s normal and that differences are to be celebrated. By the time youngsters have completed the OWL program in middle school, they can not only build a pretty good replica of the human reproductive system out of pipe cleaners, but will have had an opportunity to discuss what makes a good or bad relationship, learned about date rape, wrestled with gender stereotypes, shared feelings about same-sex and opposite-sex friendships, mastered the art of putting on a rubber, and explored the basics of lovemaking, all under the guidance of trained adults in a safe and confidential setting, taught over the course of twenty-eight weeks. The reason that OWL is so comprehensive is not because we expect seventh and eighth graders to put this knowledge to immediate use. Sexual activity is discouraged for younger adolescents, and it is illegal for those under sixteen years of age. But I don’t believe that pre-marital sex is necessarily wrong from a moral standpoint. And when my son or daughter finds the right person, at the right time, I want them to be able to do the right thing.

And what is the right thing? OWL teaches that healthy sexual relationships are consensual, non-exploitative, mutually pleasurable, safe, age appropriate, based on mutual caring, and respectful in the sense of being aboveboard and honoring commitments made to others. It’s simply not enough to say that sex inside marriage is sacred but wicked outside the marital bond. Relationships are more complicated than that.

But at the same time, the rules for what we want to teach our children remain fairly simple. They’re summed up in the words of the Skin Horse from the popular children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit. We want to be real with children. We want to be truthful, always. And we want them to know that being able to give and receive love is a blessing unlike any other.

I am so grateful to this year’s OWL leaders, E. J. Haack, Jon Olson and Martha Dallas, who have dedicated a full year to working with our congregation’s seventh and eighth graders, and grateful also to Elz Curtiss, whose commitment and hard work made it possible to offer OWL again this year. As they celebrate the completion of this year’s program, we celebrate with them, for nothing that we do here is more important than this work of rearing young people to become adults capable of caring, who are comfortable in their own skins and so far free from guilty and insecurity that they can form mature commitments and open their hearts in vulnerability to their beloved.

Because human beings were not made to be abstinent. Nor are we intended to be confused or frightened about who we are. As sexual beings, we are intended to love and be loved, in equality and freedom, in a physical act that is also a spiritual act, a union of body and soul.