.- The Bishops’ Conference of Argentina is calling for laws that promote responsible education programs on sexuality. During an annual gathering of university rectors, the bishops’ document on “The Challenge of Educating in Love” was presented for discussion, in view of the eventual passage of new law on sex education.
The bishops said new laws should be “positive and prudent” and should consider “the right and duty” of parents in the moral education of their children, a role which “cannot be substituted” by the state nor the school.
Likewise the bishops said laws must defend life “from the moment of conception, and absolutely forbid the crime of abortion.” They also said any new law must not promote anti-life policies and must recognize the inalienable right and duty of parents over the moral education of their children.
In their document the bishops warn that the State cannot be a substitute for the family, even families that are wounded by division or the absence of father or mother. At the same time they noted that the State should assist broken families “with prudence” and without falling into an “abuse of ideologies” with “no respect for the culture and tradition of nations.”
The bishops called for legal measures that assist young people in developing a proper respect for sexuality, marriage and the family and the rejecting of laws that would be destructive to families.
Father Ruben Revello, director of the Institute on Bioethics of the Catholic University of Argentina, and Dr. Zelmira Bottini de Rey of the Institute on Marriage and the Family, both of the Catholic University of Argentina, presented the document at the annual conference of rectors.
Father Revello called on the rectors to “teach healthy sex education” and warned against the ideology of gender promoted by certain feminist organizations, whose objectives are to bring down the traditional family and motherhood and to question “obligatory heterosexuality” and the “cultural patriarchy.” “For these people the three bad Ms are maternity, menstruation and marriage,” he noted.
Father Revello also pointed out how feminist groups pressure the UN, the World Bank and the World Monetary Fund to accept their understanding of gender and to make it a condition for providing aid that countries incorporate such perspectives in their laws
For her part, Bottini recalled that the Church prefers to speak about “integral sexual education” or “education in love” rather than just plain sexual education.
