(LifeSiteNews) — Some of you may be old enough to remember a time when governments were demanding that people “socially distance” from one another in order to “stop the spread” of infection. Unsurprisingly, there are no such calls as Western countries see massive surges of sexually transmitted diseases – now referred to as “STIs,” or “sexually transmitted infections,” since that sounds far less serious.
From the New York Post on March 7:
Sexually transmitted infections skyrocketed across Europe in 2022 – with reported gonorrhea cases alone nearly doubling. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control expressed ‘deep concern’ with the rising rates, released Thursday as part of the group’s most recent data set. Syphilis cases rose by 34% between 2021 and 2022, amounting to more than 35,000 cases in the latter year. Chlamydia cases jumped by 16% to more than 216,000. More than 70,000 individuals were reported with gonorrhea infections in 2022, a 48% surge from the year before. Other STIs, including lymphogranuloma venereum and congenital syphilis – which is transmitted from mother to fetus – also saw major increases.
According to ECDC Director Andrea Ammon: “The numbers paint a stark picture, one that needs are immediate attention and action.” Or perhaps less action. The New York Post had previously reported a surge in STIs in New York City in 2022, with “gonorrhea rates up by 11% among men and syphilis rates skyrocketing a staggering 36% among women, according to the Big Apple’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.” Ammon added that the reported numbers are probably far too low due to lack of testing, and that the surges were probably “the tip of the iceberg.”
Predictably, however, the ECDC and press reports avoided pointing fingers at the reasons behind these waves of STIs. According to the ECDC, the increase was due in part to “riskier sexual behavior,” but “mostly the lack of information on sexually transmitted diseases.” After a couple of generations of sex education, in which young people are instructed on virtually every aspect of coitus while being told that moral boundaries are bigoted, the farce of this “education” is blindingly obvious to anyone with a functioning frontal cortex. “Sex education,” because it encourages sexual behavior, has caused more STIs, more abortions, and an enormous amount of emotional damage.
A sane response to these numbers would be to warn people that promiscuity is dangerous and that engaging in it makes contracting an STI likely. Instead, the ECDC “theorized that the rise in gonorrhea infections could be due to antimicrobial resistance, but said it was still monitoring the possibility. Fighting the surge would involve a heightened awareness of STIs, enhanced prevention methods, access to testing and effective treatment.” How much more aware can people be? We already have sex education in schools from very young ages. There are health advisories, public information campaigns, billboards; basically everything besides letting people know that sleeping around is bad for your health.
John McGuirk made this point recently in an editorial for Gript titled “What does 10,000 monthly STI tests say about our culture?” Nothing good, he observes: “It’s easy and tempting to look at the figures, released yesterday, showing 10,000 home STI kits being ordered in Ireland every month, and just write it off as another sign of civilisational decline. Your correspondent knows this because, in truth, that was my own initial reaction: What kind of society do we live in where there are tens of thousands of people every month living in the fear that they’ve caught something from a sexual partner? The answer, sadly, is ‘modern society.’”
Advocates of modern sex education will say that the reason it is so important to instruct children in the finer details of love-making and give them information about contraceptives and all the rest of it is that they’re “going to do it anyways” and thus resistance is futile. The same folks who think we can change the climate and end poverty think that it is ridiculous to expect young people to perhaps keep their pants on. Sex education has been a total failure, on its own terms, as every statistic tells us. Unless, of course, the result we got was the intended effect.