FAMILY RESEARCH REPORT	Journal of the Family Research Institute Founded 1982
'Good Health' Habits Can't Be Taught			Vol. 16 No. 1 Jan-Feb 2001

As Americans, we believe in ‘education.’ Of national concerns, no other issue garners more attention. The new president says it’s his number one priority. And Congress echoes him.

There are different types of ‘education’ of course. Everyone knows we can teach kids how to read, do math, or make things. While there is serious debate about when certain topics are ‘age-appropriate,’ or even how to teach these subjects, there is little disagreement that most kids will master lessons about ‘how to’ read, add and subtract, etc. at some point in their education. But when it comes to values, such as ‘should you make explosives’ (even if you know how) or ‘should you save intercourse for marriage,’ the question is a bit more uncertain. Can the school system teach kids to be ‘moral’ or, in a more limited sense, to pursue personal ‘health?’ Lots of people hope so, and fights over the moral ‘tilt’ of a given cirriculum occur regularly. But the question remains, can schools effectively teach values?

With AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases raging among young people, almost everyone agrees that kids should be pursuing a healthy, safe lifestyle. When it comes to drug abuse or even tobacco smoking, the chorus grows that kids need to be healthier. Consequently, most societal institutions agree that sexuality ought to be postponed until late in high school or even later, and that kids should not smoke or do drugs.

But can we teach those kinds of things? That is, can we predictably ‘influence kids’ or ‘teach kids’ in a way that makes them less apt to engage in fornication, use illegal drugs or smoke? Do we know how to teach even the limited aspect of morality known as ‘healthy living?’

Leaving sex and drugs aside — with their powerful pleasures and addictive tendencies — let’s consider something more simple, like smoking tobacco. Some might argue that almost everyone ‘has to engage in sex,’ or that certain people are ‘born to engage in homosexuality,’ but no one argues that people are ‘born to smoke.’ After all, it was only a few hundred years ago that American Indians were the only ones who knew about and used tobacco. And pretty much everybody agrees that kids should be persuaded not to smoke. But, how would you go about getting kids not to smoke, or, if they are already smoking, to moderate or stop their smoking?

You might turn to the premiere prevention bureaucracy — the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After all, its name says “prevention” and it is responsible for educating youth and other citizens about HIV, condoms, etc. If you wanted to make doubly sure you were doing ‘all the right things,’ you might also enlist experts from the National Cancer Institute. And if you got experts from both groups together, and they drew up your strategy for you, you ought to have the best of all worlds. The experts in public health should have a better plan than anyone else.

You would have to plan on spending a lot of money, of course, to have a large enough number of kids in the ‘experimental’ and ‘comparison’ groups. And you would want the scheme to be more than a ‘one shot’ lecture or movie. After all, you would want the scheme to influence kids from early in their life — say 3rd grade or about age 9 — to after they got out of high school, say about 20 years of age.

If you were willing do just about everything humanly possible in school (given that kids have to have ample time to learn other things), and the kids were given instruction about smoking every year they were in school, you would expect results. Those kids who benefited from the scheme (e.g., got the ‘treatment’) should less frequently begin smoking, and if they already smoked, to smoke less, than kids in a matched control group who didn’t get this expert-devised, very expensive treatment.
Such a ‘dream experiment’ was, in fact, carried out.1 From 1984 through 1999, 40 Washington state school districts were randomly assigned to the intervention or the control condition. 8,388 students participated. During the experiment, the state of Washington mandated ‘tobacco free school grounds’ and also did compliance checks on retailers to make sure they weren’t selling tobacco to the underaged.

The planned ‘intervention’ involved utilizing just about every ‘trick’ in the educational arsenal: teaching 1) skills for identifying social influences to smoke (e.g., tobacco advertising; peer influence), 2) skills for resisting influences to smoke, and 3) information for correcting erroneous perceptions regarding smoking. Further, teachers who gave the lessons 1) attempted to motivate the students to want to be smoke free, 2) promoted self-confidence in one’s ability to refuse various pressures, and 3) enlisted positive family influences.

All of these goals were incorporated into a series of 65 classroom lessons spread over grades 3 through 10. In addition, there were newsletters to teachers giving tips and new information about smoking cessation. There were also attempts to “harness adolescents’ rebelliousness and redirect it against the actions of the tobacco companies.” Besides the typical anti-smoking posters, there were attempts to make the anti-tobacco efforts exciting and stimulating.

While one might not agree with every single thing that was done or attempted, each of the goals and strategies was reasonable and apparently age-appropriate to the targeted children. In short, this was a well-conceived program dealing not just with health effects of smoking on the individual, but also on the cosmetic effects, physical fitness aspects, family aspects, and the effects of second-hand tobacco smoke. All told, almost 50 hours of instruction was spread over the 8 grades (no anti-tobacco lessons were given in grades 11 and 12).

To test the results of these efforts, the proportion of kids claiming to smoke was assessed at grade 12 and two years afterward, for both the ‘experimental’ group (i.e., those who got the treatment) and the control group (i.e., those who just got the usual curriculum). In addition, a certain proportion of the students were given saliva tests so that ‘their word’ was not the only outcome. In FRI’s opinion, this was an extremely well-done study. At a cost of $15 million, spread over 14 years, it was the kind of study just about any social scientist would ‘give his right arm for.’

So what happened? Did it work? In a word — no.

Among the 20 school districts which served as controls, the average smoking prevalence in the 12th grade was 25% for girls and 27% for boys. Among the 20 experimental school districts, the average smoking prevalence for girls was 24% and for boys 26%. Two years after high school the average smoking prevalence was 26% for girls and 33% for boys in the control group and 27% for girls and 30% for boys in the experimental group.

Bottom line: there is no reason to believe all the time and effort spent on the kids in the experimental group worked — none whatsoever. It will further be noted that two years out of high school, more members were smoking in each of the groups — that is, being out of school and being ‘older and wiser’ were associated with more kids smoking.
The authors said “we must conclude,... that the... school-based, enhanced social-influences smoking prevention intervention that started early, and that was sustained throughout the period of smoking acquisition, did not work.”

And unlike so many previous efforts, these authors were well aware of the fine piece of research they had carried out. They concluded that “given this major failure... despite the extensive nature of the intervention, the remedy should not be more of the same (e.g., starting earlier, lasting longer...)... It may be time for an altogether new approach.... Unfortunately, and consistent with previous randomized trials in school-based smoking prevention that have used the social-influences approach and that have followed children to grade 12, there is no evidence from [our study] that a school-based social-influences approach is effective in deterring smoking among youth, either overall or for low- or high-risk children.”

Given the importance of education in our culture, and the widespread belief that ‘if we just have the right education’ almost any goal is achievable, what went wrong? The smoking intervention assumed that kids are rational and and that they think in terms of their long-term or at least short-term interests. But it did not appear to have any effect whatsoever.
This is the same strategy that is being employed in school districts around the U.S. to ‘combat AIDS,’ ‘fight drugs,’ ‘stop date-rape,’ etc. If a program that appears plausible doesn’t work for something as noxious and costly as smoking, how can it hope to work for something that is as pleasurable and easy to get as sex?

Humankind is an enigma. Somehow we are rather rational when it comes to building planes, making computers, or growing crops. But when it comes to our personal behavior, we are, at best, semi-rational. Think of the ‘bad press’ that smoking gets. The president is against it. The schools are against it. The liberals are against it and so are the conservatives. All the scientific evidence is against it. Parents don’t like it (even if they smoke themselves). But kids continue to take up smoking!

This is a big study with important implications. The human mind is a strange thing. Predicting what ‘will work’ educationally to curb certain kinds of moral choices is not that easy — even for things like preventing or curbing a habit which is smelly, costly, takes a while to get used to, is condemned and deplored by all kinds of scientists, moralists, educators etc., and often interferes with one’s health or other activities. When the choice is a ‘fun’ activity like sex, how much more difficult must it be to design an effective educational program?
Of course, this is only one study. It does not ‘close the door’ on teaching morality in school. But it suggests — at the very least — that the current ‘best laid plans of mice, men, and educators’ may not work in school… at all!

As a side note, consider the case of Van Crawford. Crawford’s case illustrates that good morals are not guaranteed even if taught at home. He was “raised in Chicago by a loving, churchgoing family.... his parents and his brother and sister did everything together — including cooking and delivering Christmas dinner to elderly neighbors every year.” “Their way of life was to do good deeds for people every day.”

Van “led youth groups within the church. He led neighborhood athletic teams.... He sang in the church and played the guitar.” Van moved to Denver to be near relatives, got a job, married and had kids. Early last year, Van walked into a bank, opened fire, stole some money, and hijacked a car for the get away. When the red-dye bomblet hidden in the money exploded, a female motorist who saw the smoke in the car stopped to help. In return, Van took her Ford Expedition at gunpoint.

Van has never been able to explain his actions. The judge gave him 15 years “to improve yourself... the lowest sentence I felt I could give under the law.” The only words Van uttered during the trial were “thank you” when the sentence was passed.2

References:
1. Peterson AV, Kealer KA, Mann SL, Marek PM, Sarason IG. Hutchinson smoking prevention project: long-term randomized trial in school-based tobacco use prevention — results on smoking. Journal National Cancer Institute 2000;92:1979-91.
2. Rocky Mountain News 1/12/01.

Adult-onset, ideologically-caused homosexuality — an increasingly important type which therapists rarely see and psychotherapists have largely ignored — is described in the January 2, 2001 New York Times. In a Science section “conversation with Anne Fausto-Sterling,” Anne is a formerly-married, now lesbian, professor of biology and women’s studies at Brown University who works on human “sexual plasticity.” She describes how her interest in gender issues, which began while she was married, led to her involvement in feminism, whose views about the relationship between the sexes — that men oppress women — “did what they did to lots of women in the 1970’s: they infuriated me. My poor husband, who was a very decent guy, tried as hard as he could to be sympathetic. But he was shut out of what I was doing. The women’s movement opened up the feminine in a way that was new to me, and so my involvement made possible my becoming a lesbian.” Her new status probably helped get her a “women’s studies” position at Brown. But she also added, “I don’t think loving a man is unimaginable.”

Adolescent-onset, ideologically-caused homosexuality produces what Dr. Charles W. Socarides calls “the Thanksgiving Massacre.” That’s when youngsters come home in the middle of their first college semesters to announce, often at the holiday dinner table, “Hey, mom, hey dad! Be thankful! I have something to tell you. I’m gay!” This murders the hopes found in every family that their children be happily married with children of their own. These youngsters, away from home for the first time, have been seduced by a homosexual crowd “that has taken on all the aspects of a cult.” And psychotherapy won’t help them because, like the rest of that huge majority of homosexuals whom therapists never see, they do not want to change.

Many colleges actively assist recruitment into homosexuality. At Harvard, for example, of which Dr. Socarides and I are both alumni (‘43 and ‘42 respectively), a Presbyterian minister, unaware of the fluidity of adolescent sexual feelings (whose changeability later in life Prof. Fausto-Sterling demonstrated), proclaimed his pride in helping “those who are discovering that they are gay or lesbian, to help them understand that that’s not an obstacle to their blessedness in God’s eyes.“

The university’s chief minister (and Plummer Professor of Christian [sic] Morality), Rev. Peter Gomes, maintaining that God made him homosexual — although being celibate is his own choice — describes those opposing the legitimization of homosexuality as neurotic, religious bigots or stupid.

Each Harvard dormitory had a designated gay tutor in 1995, when Dr. Socarides wrote his book. But the university’s high point in legitimizing homosexuality was Harvard Magazine’s January-February, 1998, cover article, ‘Gay Like Me,’ by Andrew Tobias (‘68, M.B.A. ‘72), currently treasurer of the Democratic Party National Committee. Denying the fluidity of adolescent sexual feelings, Tobias celebrated (and the Magazine published) his claim that the homosexual feelings he had agonized over throughout his college years are “the most natural thing in the world” — if you are born gay.

The “LUG phenomenon” — lesbian until graduation — is another example of the post-childhood college road to homosexuality. Co-eds date and have sex with other women, but only for four years. But after four years of same-sex sex, how ready will they be for a heterosexual marriage? And having moved so often from one relationship to another, what’s to make them stick with their men when they encounter the inevitable problems that come with any marriage?

The ideological recruitment of college students and other adults into homosexuality is far more prevalent, and far more dangerous, than most people, including relatively conservative psychiatrists, realize. That’s why those who consider sex as serious and even sacred, rather than trivial, who support passionate, faithful marriage and oppose promiscuity and homosexuality, must actively enter the political and media arena to proclaim the superior sexual joys of marriage and energetically rebut the lies about genetics and childhood experience by those who self-servingly claim that homosexuality is predetermined and inevitable.

The Weekly Standard is getting a lot of attention for publishing Mary Eberstadt’s “‘Pedophilia chic’ reconsidered“ (1/1/01). Eberstadt assembles — four years after deploring the same trend — plenty of evidence that homosexuals are still ‘into’ kids, particularly boys. But something is different in the article in this ostensibly ‘conservative magazine.’

Consider that Eberstadt condemns the misguided efforts by some gay organizations to refer teens to unsavory and perhaps even unsafe websites. [a turnaround must be made]... in the case of chain bookstore merchandisers, who routinely place pro-pedophile works on the gay-interest shelves — a phenomenon that thoughtful movement activists must find outrageous.

It would help immensely if those members of the gay rights movement who have not realized what is being committed in their name — along with those who do realize what is going on, and who deplore it — join forces against this trend. Here too, one can imagine progress being made; decent people, by definition, tend ultimately to do what decency requires.

Mary Eberstadt is living in a fantasy world. Why did she suppose that she was unable to point to a gay group that was “outraged” by the on-going assault on boys? Why did she have to “imagine progress being made” when the very evidence she once again assembled showed steady erosion of the defense of boys against homosexual adults? The answer is fairly straightforward: What she deplores was true four years ago and has been true for thousands of years. Those who engage in homosexuality are not “decent people,” they are primarily “perverted people” who cannot be counted on to “ultimately to do what decency requires.”

The Weekly Standard thus joins other ‘conservative’ publications willing to give ‘gays a place at the table’ and is then “outraged” when homosexuals behave as they always have.

The American Enterprise is also implicated in this ultimate naiveté. In its December, 2000 issue it ran a piece “Gay intolerance — The New York Times.” The author, Jonah Goldberg, decried the tilt of the Times against the Boy Scouts and for gay rights. He cited Rick Berke, the paper’s political writer, who told a gay journalists’ group that “There are times when you look at the front-page meeting” of the Times and “literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.”
Then, Goldberg added, there “are many serious arguments for making space for gays in American life. They are friends and family, taxpayers and citizens, equal human beings in the eyes of God.” He just as easily could have said about either drug abusers or child molesters that there “are many serious arguments for making space for drug abusers or child molesters in American life. They are friends and family, taxpayers and citizens, equal human beings in the eyes of God.”

Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, aged 43, may have abducted, killed and eaten his last lad. Seems he was convicted of molesting at least 4 boys in Massachusetts and spent 12 years living at state expense at a sex offenders treatment center there. Massachusetts officials decided that they didn’t want him around anymore, so they shipped him to Montana.

Apparently the ‘treatment’ — even 12 years of it — just didn’t work (it doesn’t have a very good track record). He has been arrested in Great Falls, Montana for molesting at least 54 boys. But his appetite for homosexual sex with boys didn’t stop at molestation. He is now charged with abducting, raping, and then cooking 10-year old Zachary Ramsay. Besides indulging himself, he fed parts of the boy to “unsuspecting friends and family.”

As near as we can tell, while heterosexuals have been known to molest children, to abduct to molest, and to have abducted and killed, only homosexuals have been implicated in abducting, molesting, killing, and then eating parts of their underage victims. Historically, it is known that Gilles de Rais (Bluebeard) abducted, molested, killed, and then ate at least parts of hundreds of boys. Ludwig Tiene — a Nazi — strangled, crushed, and gnawed boys and young men to death while he raped them at Auschwitz. And of course, Jeffrey Dahlmer not too long ago killed and ate parts of 17 boys and young men in Milwaukee.

Sexual molestation and abduction are not that infrequent. Killing such victims is relatively rare. But eating them appears to be unique to homosexuals.

Reference: Denver Post 1/10/01

Corner
Great Britain Wants Homosexuals!

As a researcher, I subscribe to various homosexual periodicals. So my pseudonym exists in gay databases. The homosexual crowd is certainly growing, because the mail to my pseudonym keeps getting grander and more frequent. Early this year I got a nice package from Britain. The letter and 24 page brochure, paid for by British taxpayers, declared that the “British Tourist Authority” wanted “lesbian & gay travelers.” The 8.5 x 11 inch glossy full-color brochure, entitled Britain: Inside & Out (essential lesbian and gay Britain), features pictures of (mainly) gay and lesbian couples. Gay life in Britain is touted on every page (you can see more at www.gaybritain.org). London, Manchester, Brighton, Edinburgh, and Glasgow all make their appearance.

We have a puzzle here. HIV — as well as a myriad of other diseases — are disproportionately spread by homosexuals. Homosexuals are also disproportionately involved in criminality and other forms of social disruption. From a very narrow perspective, it may be good for the tourist industry to attract those who would spend their money in Britain. But it is obviously bad public health policy to invite the risk of more disease and more social problems to your shores. Given the medical and social costs associated with AIDS and other diseases, plus the risk of importing as yet unknown infections (like AIDS was around 1980), plus the costs of additional child molestations and other criminal behavior, does it all make sense? Not quite!

While no one has the data to enable a ‘bottom line’ analysis, I doubt that Britain makes more money on visiting homosexuals than it loses to diseases they spread. And if the social problems that homosexuals cause are added in, I suspect it has to be a lose/lose proposition. Further, by lowering the ‘sexual bar,’ Britain, which currently has an even greater problem with out-of-wedlock birth rates than the U.S., is encouraging worse. The whole business is just not rational. But it is politically correct. Those who think humanity is fundamentally rational have not examined our race very closely.

Family Research Report critically examines empirical data on families, sexual social policy, AIDS, drug addiction, and homosexuality, digging behind the 'headlines' and breaking new scientific ground.

FRR is published 8 times/year by the Family Research Institute.

Dr. Paul Cameron, Publisher

Dr. Kirk Cameron, Editor

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