HOW CHRISTIAN EFFORTS IN AFRICA PROMOTE DIGNITY AND HEALTH
January 2016
If you ride New York City’s subways, you will see public service advertisements blazoned above you. Some come from “NYC Condom,” a service of the New York City Health Department, some from other groups (like the BACCHUS Initiatives of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators). The messages come in snappy phrases and acronyms: “Take Pride. Take Care.” “Be Sexy. Be Safe.” Or the three “B’s” and three “S’s”: “B Smart. B Sexy. B Safe.”
This is America’s moral conscience at work: Have sex as you want, and wear a condom. It isn’t only the “safe” part, don’t get or give a disease, that constitutes the moral lesson. There’s also the “sexy” part: to “be you,” and to be “proud” of being you, do the sexy thing. They go together.
The very shallowness of the message is part of its destructiveness. Not only is the “safe” part not really true—condoms only kind of help, and they do nothing to fend off the emotional danger. To believe that “safe sex” is a mode of self-fulfillment is to embrace a lie about human personhood that harms the body and soul together. Still, it’s the prevailing message in America today, paid for by the nurturing parent of municipal care that hovers over the millions of young and old who travel the rattling subways on their way to and from the world’s financial center.
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