The Catholic Bishop’s Conference has been making waves this past week, after they issued a communiqué that touches on several pertinent issues within the current political and socio-economic climate.

Most of the attention has been on their political comments, condemning the MP’s on the China chairs debacle and criticising the economy. Thus little attention is paid to another comment they passed, condemning the growing culture of better sex education to students in senior high school.

The situation is that there has been an increased exposure to contraception being given to said students, including the supply of condoms through some programs to some of these students.

The Conference condemned the situation in no uncertain terms, labelling it a ‘culture of death’. The relevant part of the communiqué reads…

“We also deplore in no uncertain terms a radical and faceless culture of death which promotes among other things the supply and use of the condom in our schools, the in vitro fertilisation and the contraception agenda of some national and international institutions in Ghana

Painfully, some Ghanaian homosexual and pro-abortion groups, and even our Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection overtly and subtly support these international organisations. We wish to draw the attention of all Ghanaians to this dangerous “culture of death” being imposed on us and call on all Ghanaians to forcefully reject this so-called freedom which indeed is suicidal. Further, we urge those who represent Ghana at the United Nations and other such bodies to realise that these practices are culturally abominable and morally and spiritually reprehensible”

True they are the church and are supposed to be the bastion of morality and all that, but in this case I believe they are playing the ostrich, which buries its head in the sand. Ignoring a problem does not make it go away, and the truth is that most teenagers these days have an active sekz life.

So the church can call for preaching abstinence all they want, but no one seems to be listening. In that situation the next best thing is to make sure those who refuse to go by abstinence at least are aware of a safe method to have their ‘fun’.

Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Teenage Pregnancy are two big problems we face in our society; therefore we must not be doing a very good job at keeping these teenagers of sekz. Either can be prevented through condom use, so these programs aimed at supplying condoms might actually be saving some lives in the long run.

Besides given someone a condom is not carte-blanche for them to go and indiscriminately defile themselves. Everyone makes these decisions on a personal level, and if the church and their parents have done a good job most would know to abstain.

Unfortunately neither party has; and in such a situation where you have a blazing fire you do not call for the fire extinguishers to be taken away, that’s just a recipe for disaster. So they can act outraged all they like, the problem is not going anywhere; and by problem I don’t mean sharing condoms to Senior High School Students.

The Ostrich buries its head in the sand when there is a situation it does not particularly want to deal with; the whole premise of their outrage is that the sharing of the condoms puts seks on the minds of these teenagers. That ignores the biggest reality of all: no one is a stranger to seks anymore.

That is the situation to be dealt with, and they would see that if their heads wasn’t too deep in the sand.