Speaker promotes chastity, decries abortion
by Bob Schaefer
Staff Writer, Tiger’s Eye
Students in Hutchinson were presented last month with a first time ever opportunity: to attend a clinic on sexual values promoted by a group unaffiliated with the school district.
The presentation, entitled “Sex Has A Price Tag,” was sponsored by almost all of the local churches, and was held at Peace Lutheran Church. Guest speaker for the rally was Pam Stenzel, three-year director of the Alpha Women’s Center.
The assembly began with a short prayer, after which Stenzel took the floor. “I worked for eight years with kids who made the wrong choices, and I finally decided that I wanted to keep the hurt from happening, not just bandage it,” she said.
Throughout the program Stenzel emphasized the three elements of her philosophy. First, she told the audience that they were created by God. “You’re not a monkey!” Stenzel said. “You have a soul, and a spirit. God made you.”
Second, she told participants that “each of us came with an instruction manual, and we have to follow our instructions. If we don’t, then we will get hurt.” To reinforce her point, a student was asked to pound a nail through a chair with an ordinary alarm clock. “Do you always do what you’re told to?” she asked the student, taking the broken clock. “This is what happens when we try to do something we’re not meant to do.”
Her third principle was that this life is not a dress rehearsal. No one gets to start over again and try to do better.
“If you forget everything else I say here today,” she told her audience,” remember this - if you have sex before you marry you will pay. I don’t want anyone to be able to leave my presentation and say ‘I didn’t know about the consequences.’ Someone has told you.”
As support for remaining chaste, or being pure sexually both inside and out of marriage, Stenzel described several results of premarital sex. Pregnancy and STDs topped the list of physical consequences.
“And then there’s AIDS,” she said. “What are you going to do to protect yourself from that?” Stenzel addressed the members of the audience seven to fifteen years old: “In ten years, thirty to fifty percent of you will be dead or dying of AIDS.”
In addition to the physical price of sex, there are also emotional tolls. “Love is a legitimate emotion,” Stenzel conceded, “but the context for sex is not just love, it’s permanent commitment.”
Spiritually, she said, we pay the price of being separated from God. “God loves you, and he made some rules to protect you. Remember the clock? It’s broken now, but a good repairman could fix it. God is a very good repairman.”
Concluding the rally was a discussion of abortion. Stenzel, a passionate pro-lifer, showed her audience a model of an 11-month old fetus, clearly visible from the back of the assembly hall. “Can you see this?” she asked. “This is the ‘microscopic tissue’ that a doctor will tell you is being aborted. Women are being lied to.”
Stenzel then described in detail the abortion procedure. Doctors must count two arms, two legs, a backbone, and a skull before they may end an abortion, she said.
Abortions, said Stenzel, are legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy. “So that you can be informed, I’m going to show a videotape of an actual abortion. It isn’t pretty, but I encourage you to watch it. We can’t talk about something if we don’t know what it really is.”
The video, which several people could not bring themselves to view, showed an eleventh week abortion. The narrator himself was an abortionist until a few years ago, when his conscience forced him to quit.
Stenzel’s sober voice cut through the stunned silence that followed the video presentation: “This is not a dress rehearsal.”
The presentation concluded with a song, “Be The One,” performed by Al Denson. Students, parents, and everyone else in attendance was asked to stand up if they wanted to make a difference. By the song’s end not a single person was still sitting.
The entire presentation was videotaped, and segments have aired on HCVN Channel 10 twice.
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Ssite, contents, and design copyright © 2002-2006 Robert James Schaefer. All rights reserved.
Last updated Sunday, August 20, 2006.
