Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

Students at Franciscan University at Steubenville are waging war on a culture that preaches empty sex and broken relationships by launching an edgy new website that features youth speaking to youth about to get “sexy” – with love.

According to Elizabeth Crnkovich writing for the Population Research Institute, the new site called 1Flesh: The Revolt Against Contraception in Marriage is the brainchild of Marc Barnes and a group of fellow students who are determined to put an end to the empty relationships of the prevailing “hook up” culture and bring the love, meaning and romance back into relationships.

Calling themselves “A grassroots movement in opposition to the use of artificial contraception, dedicated to bringing great sex to the entire universe,” their mission is “to spread words of rebellion; that sex should be awesome and saved until marriage, that pregnancy can be justly avoided without harmful chemicals, and that love is worth fighting for.”

The website contains a series of edgy videos with young people describing the physical, emotional and ecological dangers of hormonal contraception, as well as a variety of statistics and other data showing why young people should trade in their pills for what the site calls “100% organic sex.” Detailed explanations about modern methods of natural family planning, such as the Creighton Model Fertilitycare System and the Billings Ovulation Method are also provided.

In their own words, 1Flesh strives “to inform women of the risks of birth control pills, to call out pharmaceutical companies for their life-endangering, false and manipulating advertising of the drugs, and to promote the concept that women can understand and work with their own fertility instead of relying on pharmaceutical companies.”

Of course, the site has had its share of attacks. Here’s how the liberal Salon.com described the site and its message: “Sure, the site has remarkably good design, especially for appealing to a younger audience (it looks quite a bit like MTV’s website), but the second one starts reading the content, it becomes clear that all the Twitter and Tumblr pages in the world can’t hide the fact that it’s promoting a no-sex-before-marriage agenda that will never, ever be cool.”

Emma Gray of the liberal HuffPost Women blog took the usual tack of accusing the site of “fear-mongering” because it posts what she calls disputed facts such as how condoms don’t prevent the transmission of STD’s (she obviously hasn’t read the New England Journal of Medicine lately) and that the pill doesn’t stop unwanted pregnancies (per the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute more than half of all women who experience unwanted pregnancy are using contraceptives in the month in which they became pregnant).

“But note also that this kind of fear-mongering becomes especially dangerous when you consider the audience being targeted — young people who may or may not be informed enough to separate fact from fiction,” Gray accuses. (She might want to take her own advice.)

But Barnes and his colleagues are not backing down and are making their voices heard amidst the din of the culture of death.

“The sexual revolution of the last generation has left a legacy of broken lives and broken hearts for all to see,” writes Crnkovich. “Young people do not want to make the same mistakes as their parents and older siblings. They want to be seen as persons, not sex objects. They want romance, not the humdrum boredom of loveless sex. They want monogamy, not the multiple partners that leads to STDs. Today’s generation is searching to regain what their parents lost.”

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