In his 2003 book Parents’ Answer Book: A Comprehensive Resource From Today’s Most Respected Parenting Expert, evangelical leader and corporal punishment advocate James Dobson answers the following question from a reader:
“If you were a parent and knew that your son or daughter was thinking about engaging in sexual intercourse, wouldn’t you talk to them about condom usage? If our kids are going to have sex anyway, shouldn’t we make sure they are properly protected?”
Here is Dobson’s answer:
“I would not, because that approach has an unintended consequence. By recommending condom usage to teenagers, we inevitably convey five dangerous ideas: (1) that ‘safe sex’ is achievable; (2) that everybody is doing it; (3) that responsible adults expect them to do it; (4) that it’s a good thing; and (5) that their peers know they know these things, breeding promiscuity. Those are very destructive messages to give our kids… Why in the world would I recommend this so-called solution to my son or daughter? Look at it this way. Suppose my kids were sky divers whose parachutes had been demonstrated to fail 50 percent of the time. Would I suggest that they simply buckle the chutes tighter? Certainly not. I would say, ‘Please don’t jump. Your life is at stake!’ How could I, as a loving father, do less?”
Dobson is not alone among evangelical leaders and parenting teachers in encouraging parents to either withhold or deny their children access to birth control and other methods of practicing safe sexuality. Here is what homeschool leader and courtship proponent Reb Bradley wrote in the 1996 edition of his book Child Training Tips: What I Wish I Knew When My Children Were Young about how to go about “teaching children to assume responsibility for themselves”:
“If they are sexually promiscuous, do not give them birth control.”
This tip is given alongside other gems like, “If they use illegal drugs, do not give them clean needles.”
Another highly influential evangelical, the anti-feminist and pro-Quiverfull author Mary Pride, goes out of her way in her 1985 book The Way Home: Beyond Feminism Back to Reality to describe different methods of birth control in the worst ways possible. Here, for example, is how Pride discusses condoms:
“Other contraceptive methods, while less hazardous than the Pill and the IUD, are medically counterproductive in that they make the sex act to some degree ludicrous or unpleasant… [When a couple uses a condom, there is] the depressing and unromantic interruption of marital activities which occurs while the husband is searching for and sheathing himself in rubber, so that instead of a warm human being his wife finds herself getting intimate with a small model of the Goodyear Blimp.”
A. SMALL. MODEL. OF. THE. GOODYEAR. BLIMP.
Now that is an image I will not get out of my head for far too long.