Safety and Sex

Searching the online thesaurus on WordPerfect (yes, some of us at SoL still use WP) for synonyms of the word safety, we happened upon this surprisingly short and narrow list:

refuge
guard
base hit
prophylactic
rubber
condom
safe

Wait a sec, so our culture (or the software producers who presume to represent the culture) has come to equate the general, everyday word, safety, with the trendy notion of “safe sex?” Almost half of the synonyms provided, and the only specific words, are about sex. This is really goofy for a number of reasons. First, if our software writers were about specifics, why didn’t they include fence, railing, seat belt, air bag, helmet, goggles, reflectors, and a zillion other safety items? Out of the whole world of accident prevention, why do their safety objects only refer to sex? Second, sex, however you engage in it, is serious business, prophylactic or no prophylactic. If you don’t treat it properly, rubber or no rubber, someone gets hurt in some way, that is, it isn’t safe at all when misused. Third, there is only one  perfectly safe condition for sex, condom or no condom. That one condition is when it occurs between healthy, faithful, married, loving, respectful husband and wife. Fourth, there is more to sex than so-called safety. The false doctrine of safe sex promotes sex as a casual leisure activity, effectively separating it from love, marriage, family, morality, and the health and well-being of the whole person, heart, mind, and soul. Fifth, condoms aren’t even safe the way they mean it, that is in totally preventing pregnancy or sexually-transmitted diseases! What we should be talking about when it comes to safety and sex is God and His laws for morality—right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, responsibility vs. promiscuity—rather than this red herring of so-called safe sex.  

This is just another of many evidences that dangerous and false notions have crept into our culture’s psyche and established themselves as conventional wisdom.  

By the way, Microsoft Word’s thesaurus does not include any sex references under the word safety. Open Office does include several sex references under the word safety, even more than WordPerfect.