What is the so-called purpose of sexual education? Is it to cultivate adolescents' most weak-willed and self-indulgent characteristics? Do they really need help with that? To be sure, teenage sex is a biological process with attendant biological issues of both underplanned pregnancies and unanticipated STDs. However, there is also always the moral aspect, whether Libs want to acknowledge it or not. I am not talking about the "Jesus will be sad" kind of morality that so many of the Left are so hot and ready to mock at the drop of a hat. I am talking about morality in the sense of one taking seriously the choices that affect the quality of both one's life, and the lives of everyone else around one. This is the moral point of view, and as such, it is non-denominational and non-religious.

It seems plain to me that when someone offers unsolicited instruction on a subject with profound moral implications, one ought to keep the moral aspect at or near the center of one's conversation, as doing anything less is just a more or less indirect form of pimping. While I am fairly confident that most parents are very careful about this, I am not so confident about the the care that all of the time-serving educrats assigned to teaching sex-ed will exercise. Even if a teacher does care enough to consider the moral implications, he or she is administratively and legally hamstrung six ways to Sunday in terms of talking about them. If a teacher truly wants to educate all of his or her class on any subject, then he or she has to make an effort to relate to each and every one of his or her students. But here's the rub: To relate to some students on the matter of sex requires the ability to talk about morality in terms that each student can understand which, for some students at least, will necessarily veer into the religious. "OOPS!" the law of the land says "NO!" to that! The fact is, sex is as much a moral issue as a biological one, and PUBLIC schools are the least well-equipped to deal with morality. At best, public schools can only tell half the story about sex, and only the more trivial half at that. 

In human history, being fat was associated with being both rich and powerful, as only the rich and powerful had the money to spare for all those extra calories. It is also a fact that, before the mid 20th-century food took up a much larger portion of the family budget than it did afterwards. Although raised in an era of prosperity and cheap food, Baby-Boomers were raised by the Children of the Depression resulting in a rather frugal food purchasing mindset, both in terms of quality as well as quantity. Once the Boomers started making those food choices, you saw a sea-change. Choices went from basic food staples to ready-made "convenience" foods, and ready-to-eat snacks, or junk-food. Junk-food was a rare treat in my home, but in the generation it was overflowing out of American larders like some Dali-esque cornucopia from Hell. I got to go to a burger joint once every two weeks if I was lucky, but now Americans do it three or four times each and every week. Home-cooking used to be the norm; now it's a rare and exotic exception to be indulged in by the Nuevo Riche. I ate lunch at public schools, and they offered balanced meals, but most kids went for pizza and burgers. Sooner or later, the public schools started giving kids what they and now their parents want - what's strange about that?

Prosperity, plus cheap and easy food has lead to Americans' recklessness regarding nutrition and diet. The difference between Japanese and American average body-weights serve almost as a laboratory demonstration of the difference cheap and easy food makes while controlling for overall income. For the Japanese, food is a significantly more expensive item, so they have not quite surrendered their culturally-borne and prudent dietary habits yet. Guess what? the Japanese live longer, and do not suffer nearly as much from obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. However, McDonalds, BK, and KFC are a growing presence there, so that in the next generation, the Japanese will do for dietary-based disease in the 21st-century what they did for consumer electronics in the 20th.