It also teaches kids that there is such a thing as an unforgivable action, IE that it is not just their right to, but bordering on their duty to set and enforce boundaries that they have the right to cut people out of their lives for breaching.
There is nothing conservatives fear more in this world than the idea of something that can permanently earn them the judgement and condemnation of others. To be judged by the content of their character, and that alone.
I know this is probably not going to be a popular take but honestly that seems pretty distopian as in many cases it's pretty hard to separate religion from culture so are you really going to force a Hindu family to feed their kids beef cuz they aren't old enough to practice a religion that happens to be a part of their Indian culture I know amarica has failed a lot at being the land of the free but this just seems like a step in the wrong direction
I can't think of a rule more likely to drive children into religion than banning children from religion.
Couple that with the very natural existential crisis moment kids have when they really start thinking about their own mortality and you've got a recipe for another religious Great Awakening.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say religions are doing great at driving the next generations away by doing whatever they've been doing.
I have an acquaintance who, if anyone ever talks about the subject of sex Ed around, he will insist that they will just teach the kids about blood play and it will spread STDs.
So that's the level of logic we may be dealing with here.
I have a reaallly stupid niece-in-law who prefers to keep her daughter from hanging out with her little cousin (my grand-daughter) because my daughter taught her own daughter that it's called a vagina and not a tee-tee or what-ever-the-fuck the niece-in-law insists on calling it. She literally does not want her daughter exposed to the word 'vagina'. I think the world of my nephew, but his wife can kick rocks...
When my child was young a doctor told me that if a child is sexually abused and doesn't use the proper words to describe their genitals the chance of conviction drops drastically.
I understand why books that tell kids about sex are causing conservative parents to freak out, because conservative parents hold a bizarre belief that everyone has to just pretend sex isn’t happening all around the world all the time. For some reason, this totally normal part of life must never, ever be discussed openly, and kids especially must for some reason believe in storks until a certain age.
I think conservative parents are only afraid of teaching kids about sex because they’re afraid of sex.
I also have a suspension they don't want the kids able to identify the inappropriate sexual abuse they are committing on the kids, startling how often these uptight cunts end up being pedos.
I think they fear sex because it involves a certain cutting lose and abandonment of yourself. When you're accustomed to a simple and rigid structure based on simple rules, this freedom can be experienced as a pretty deep and fundamentally frightening discomfort.
When your whole life is spent feeling so tight and wound up because you're basically walking a clearly black-and-white tightrope, this freedom probably feels straight up Satanic to some of them.
Remember, religious folks do not hold rationality as the highest measure of something, and you probably wouldn't either if you hadn't been trained in the skill. It has its uses, but there's much more important measures in their world. Life is not supposed to make complete sense to them, ever. This is why God works so often in "mysterious ways" and remains a father figure to be heeded and honored, moreso than a subject to be considered or pondered fairly.
edit: Just occured to me, but it's akin to an ex-con who gets out of prison but has to deal with being institutionalized, where they became accustomed to that simple, rigid life and don't remember how to live in the regular world. Now, they were once free men. How much harder would it have been had they been born into that simple, rigid institution?
They're all Shawshank Redemptioned. Like Brooks. Like Morgan Freeman was probably gonna be, if not for his friend.
Veterans experience something like this as well, when they try to retire from the army and come home from war. They often struggle to adapt back into our extreme levels of freedom and nonchalance.
This analysis is pretty thorough compared to what I'm used to, and throws a lot of hypotheses out there... but I would hypothesize this way, too. Unless you have sources you'd like to share? Don't mean to be intimidating or argumentative--I think what you're saying is true, but I'm still curious of the (sociological? psychological?) science behind it.
As an aside, I feel so bad for some people (like childhood victims of sexual abuse).
Idk, where I’m from, sex ed is minimal and abstinence only, parents can still pull kids out of it and the bulk of parents that do had their first child before age sixteen.
A lot of good answers here. One component I haven't seen here is that a lot of parents have this naive notion that their kids are complete Innocents and they'll stay that way if no one tells them about things like sex. It's moronic because they've forgotten that when they were kids they got urges and experimented whether someone explained things to them or not. They want their kids ignorant to keep them from growing up.
It's even more moronic these days when anyone with internet access can get to all manner of stuff. I personally wanted our kids to get sex education before they got curious and started searching for things that they weren't ready to see or understand.
Remember… marriage is a religious institution. Premarital/extramarital sex is bad because people like having sex and … if you convince everyone that you need to be married to have sex or your going to hell, then the church effectively becomes the arbiter of who can have sex.
Which means all the horny fucks in their congregation follow their rules so they can get married. Also means that the kids will be forced to grow up in the church and gives control of who they happen to start banging… because god is racist and doesn’t like mixed peoples…
I imagine there’s also an aspect of instilling a culture of shame around something that constitutes as a basic human need. That way people will invariably have at least one basic “temptation” to crawl into church to plead forgiveness over before seeking deeper religious indoctrination.
I genuinely believe that all the tabooisation around sex is a holdover from the days where birth control wasn't readily available.
There was an economic incentive for People Who Own Stuff to control procreation, because this allows them to control who inherits their stuff.
There was a personal incentive for most people to control procreation to prevent their children of making A Mistake(tm) by getting stuck with The Wrong Person(tm).
Where there's incentives, they'll wind up being followed. Story as old as time.
Cloaking all that in religion is just window dressing so one doesn't have to admit their true reasoning, but a purely secular pre-contraception society would also have tried to regulate sex.
At the same time as not contraception, infant mortality was ridiculously high. To the point that people that high estimates put the IMR at about 1/3.
There’s a reason people married young historically- they needed to start getting kids popping out. Or at least that was the mentality. More kids meant more stability and safety. Kids were free labor, the first male would inherit most or everything so that wasn’t really a problem. So they popped out a lot because the first five years were… awful.
Sex, especially gay sex, is icky. But all sex is actually icky. Unless you're doing it to procreate. Then you make it happen as fast as possible and pray for forgiveness both before and afterward.
This society knows that sex is what leads to children. What it doesn't know is how to verify if a child belongs to a particular man.
As this society is patriarchal in nature, it's very important to the leaders/men that their lineage is protected. So they need a way to ensure that children's bloodline can be properly guaranteed. The only way to control that is to make sure that women are bound to a specific man, and that sex with any other man is forbidden/disgusting. This is why bastard children and unwed mothers have historically been treated with such disdain. But men were often given a pass. The women were screwing up lineage tracking.
Tracking is less an issue these days, but the social conditioning is still there. We've forgotten why we prioritized it in the first place (right or wrong). Now it's the way many people think because it's been the way we've behaved for so long, much of society is geared around it being a basic truth.
For the general public it is because of social conditioning through various means such as society and religion. In truth the powers that be such as social and religious leaders push this concept of "sex is bad" as a means of control. It's all about control. The easiest way to brainwash a bunch of people into doing your bidding is to keep them isolated and frustrated.