sex & the Catholic Anchor

The Catholic Anchor is running an editorial in its current issue that boggles the mind. You'll have to scroll down towards the bottom of the page, just before the Questioning the Pope section.*

According to this editorial, Alaskan youth are in serious trouble, for various reasons including but not limited to marijuana use, alcohol use, and sex. But the most troubling statistic of all, and this I can't really argue with, is that more than 1 in 10 teenagers said that they'd attempted suicide sometime within the last year.

The problem is that the Anchor goes on to blame the suicide rate on human sexuality. Any human sexuality that is not within the confines of marriage and for the purpose of procreation is, according to the Anchor, the cancer that is destroying an entire society. And furthermore, the government wastes money applying band-aids (drug awareness campaigns, crisis counseling, sex education, etc.) to cancer when what it should really be doing is weeding out the cancer. Meaning, I guess, human sexuality.

But you can't just assume that there is a correlation between high suicide rates and the fact that almost half of the teenagers had recently had sex. You can't just lump together all the myriad forms of human sexuality into one big nasty monster and say that this is the root cause of suicidal behavior.

The Anchor elaborates, "In the case of our hurting youth, their problems can often be traced back to their home life. Ultimately, many of these problems come back to the misuse of sex."

Alaska has the highest rate of rape in the United States, 2.4 times higher than any other state, and sexual assault on children is 6 times higher than any other state. One can only imagine that victims of rape are not limited to the 20 and over set, and one can only imagine that victims of rape and sexual assault (everything else being equal) might tend to attempt suicide at higher rates than those lucky enough to have never been raped or sexually assaulted. I don't have numbers on this, but still, it stands to reason.

But this is not the kind of sex that the 45% of kids who'd recently had sex are referring to, presumably. Are they really arguing that sex between a pair of sixteen year olds is the same thing as being molested by an uncle or older brother or any number of possibilities? This is just ludicrous.

Our brilliant editorialist goes on to explain that "once sex is unhinged from the context of a marriage between a man and a woman, it begins to wreck havoc human lives." I'm not quite sure what the point is here, but the writer seems a bit unhinged himself, and intent on blaming teen suicide rates on all forms of sexuality, both youth and adult.

I don't know that much about this stuff, but I've read that Alaska has among the highest domestic violence, poverty, depression, and substance abuse rates in the country, as well as rape and sexual assault rates. Isn't it possible that these other issues just might contribute more heavily to teen suicide than good, old-fashioned pre-marital sex?

*Which in and of itself annoyed me. I mean, doesn't "questioning" generally mean "calling into question" or doubting or otherwise wondering if something is right or wrong, good or bad? These questions are totally inane, not to mention somewhat nonsensical. I'm sorry, Mr. Ward, but you can not say, "What do you think is the greatest issue for American (Catholics) today?" You can say, "What is the greatest issue for (American) Catholics today?" but not the other way around.