Catholic schools are not entitled to promote Catholic views on sexuality, Dr Jacky Jones, formerly of the HSE, announced in The Irish Times on Monday.

She made this interesting statement in reaction to the coverage of Pure in Heart in the media – Pure in Heart being a Catholic organisation that goes into schools around the country to promote chastity.

Dr Jones is not, to put it mildly, a fan. She writes:

‘Unbelievably, talks on sexual abstinence are still delivered to post-primary school students by external agencies. A spokeswoman for an organisation called Pure in Heart was interviewed last week on RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke.

“Her message was it’s good to be pure and abstaining from sexual activity until marriage is the best option. Listeners, who texted in their views, were largely in favour of chastity education, thought teaching about purity was ‘refreshing’, and Catholic schools were entitled to promote Catholic views on sexuality. They are not.”

No need to beat around the bush, Dr Jones, tell us what you really think.

Catholic schools are simply not entitled to teach the Catholic view of sexuality? One would think that such an extraordinary claim might require some justification, and Dr Jones duly takes us through the guidelines around the Relationship and Sexual Health Curriculum, and in the process manages to make the single most irritating sex education argument in the book. She quotes the guidelines:

“All programmes and events delivered by visitors and external agencies must use appropriate, evidence-based methodologies with clear educational outcomes.

What might these be for abstinence programmes? Students will abstain from sexual activity until marriage? An unachievable objective.”

She later adds:

“Abstinence education is like trying to teach someone to ride a bike with the brakes permanently on. It can’t be done.”

I’m 20 years old, and I’ve always found this kind of talk about young people utterly patronising. The only way the argument makes any kind of sense is if you assume that teenagers are so hyper-sexualised that any attempt to encourage them to delay having sex is automatically doomed to failure. Why? Why do we so often talk about recognising the maturity of young people, giving them greater responsibility, and listening to their voices, but when it comes to sex assume they’re only capable of putting on a condom?

As for abstinence programmes, it’s long been a common meme that these do no good or are even counter-productive. The usual examples given were US education programmes funded by the Bush Administration, which seemed to be quite happy to throw money at any initiative with the word ‘abstinence’ in its title. This worked about as well as you’d expect.

But one important study seems to demonstrate that abstinence programmes can and do work – if run well. As the Washington Post reports, the study, released in 2010, involved 662 African American students from four public middle schools in a city in the Northeastern United States.

Its findings?

“Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the  students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.”

It’s not that abstinence programmes don’t work. It’s that George W. Bush was mostly terrible at identifying and funding the ones that do. Dr Jones will have no argument from me on that score.

In conclusion, Dr Jones bemoans the general state of sex education in the country. Again, no argument from me. But then she sets out what she sees as the best model of relationships and sexuality education which is ”about choice, sexual rights, consent, and using negotiation skills.”

Isn’t this a desperately impoverished vision of sexual ethics? First of all, there’s a word that’s critically, obviously missing from that list – love. There’s not a mention of it in Dr Jones’ whole article. Instead she uses terms like ‘choice’ and ‘negotiation skills’ – the language of the marketplace, not of loving human relationships. Sex is discussed in language that wouldn’t be out of place in a National Consumer Agency report.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the right of Catholic schools to teach Catholicism (this ‘religious freedom’ stuff is old hat anyway), and just look at the model of sex education Dr Jones is proposing. How many parents actually want their children taught this way? Is this really the set of values we want to impart to our young people? I, for one, think we can do better – and that groups like Pure In Heart already are.