News

TALLINN, July 8, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A small Christian group has stopped a national ad campaign to promote condoms and promiscuous sex in Estonia, funded in part by International Planned Parenthood Federation and the European Union. 

Billboards and bus stop ads carried slogans like, “Your penis is a little tilted/slanting, and, “Let’s do it differently today – I am on top.” The ads were supposed to run until July 21st, but were removed June 16th.

The public were invited to visit the campaign website that offered tips on how to entice strangers into bed and how to download a “flirting app” for their phones. It included practical advice like “keep a condom with you, even just in case. Do not keep it in a very narrow pocket or purse … [where] the quality of the rubber may deteriorate,” and “Open the condom package with your hands, not the teeth.”

The campaign was launched after Estonian newspapers reported in 2011 that 80 percent of Estonian women do not carry condoms with them at all times.

Image

However, The Foundation for the Protection of Family and Tradition filed a complaint with the country’s national advertising standards watchdog early in June and the Consumerist Board admitted that the campaign violates the advertising law.

Click “like” if you are PRO-LIFE!

Law professor Varro Vooglaid composed the complaint that said the campaign had violated provisions in the law that prohibited advertisements “contrary to good morals and customs” or that: “encourage violation of prevailing standards of decency,” “call for activities harmful to human health,” “degrade one sex or imagine one sex as a dominant or subordinate,” or that “portray persons as sexual or sexually suggestive phrases.” He noted that the Child Protection Act does not permit the distribution of obscene or pornographic materials, printed matter or films to children. 

The campaign was sponsored in part by a grant from the European Union through the European Social Fund, the National Institute for Health Development and the Estonian Sexual Health Association (ESHA), an affiliate of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

Maria Madise, a campaigner with the Foundation for the Protection of Family and Tradition, told LifeSiteNews.com that such victories can be achieved by small groups. 

“It is important to keep hoping that no matter how fierce is the invasion of hypersexual imagery into one’s hometown, no matter how helpless one may feel at the reduction of human nature and dignity by such groups, no matter how much fidelity is ridiculed and trust in lifelong marriage between a man and a woman is hallowed, it is possible to protest and stop it.” 

“Purity and common sense do not have to back down in front of impurity and insanity.”

Madise, a teacher, said the IPPF campaign had as its “direct, unhidden purpose” encouraging young people “to lose their natural bashfulness, and tear the sexual relationships out of the private sphere and into the realm of casual sex.” Young people, she said, will respond accordingly when they are “treated as weak-willed enjoyers of life, not in control of their momentary emotions and passions.” 

The protest against the condom campaign, she added, provided a teaching moment to Estonian society, “a chance to ask ourselves whether we wish to raise a generation who build a life ultimately filled with emptiness, or with mothers and fathers”. 

“Promiscuity and safe sex do not build a safe home.”