College students are going broke! Not because tuition fees have skyrocketed over the last 10 years. Or because student loans saddle the average graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Or because dumbed-down, left-wing diploma mills promise little in the way of gainful employment after graduation.

No, students are financially strapped because they’re paying way too much for birth control. That’s how Sandra Fluke sees it. She’s a third-year law student at Georgetown. In recent weeks, Fluke has become something of a poster child for congressional Democrats who are working to drum up support for President Obama’s unpopular healthcare program.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that the government’s healthcare plan would require employers or their health insurers to provide employees with free contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients. The announcement triggered a firestorm of rebuke from Catholic bishops and conservatives who consider the mandate an unprecedented attack against religious freedom.

Sandra Fluke and her friends, on the other hand, can’t understand what the fuss is all about. Forty percent of women at Georgetown Law are struggling financially because they have to pay for their own contraceptives, Fluke says. Over the course of three years at law school, she adds, birth control can cost female students as much as $3,000.

That figure—as exaggerated as it is—still only represents a tiny drop in the truckload of college cost the average Georgetown Law student collects every semester.

But besides that, what does it say about America’s moral health when a 20-something floozy whines about having to pay a thousand dollars a year on birth control—and who firmly believes American taxpayers should pick up the tab? It’s bad enough that our universities have turned into hyper-sexualized dens of iniquity where binge drinking and hookup sex permeates every aspect of campus culture. Now it’s the working class taxpayer who is responsible for funding contraceptives to help make rampant and random sex “safe.”

At one point in her testimony, Fluke told the true story of a distressed coed who felt “embarrassed” and “powerless” upon learning at the local pharmacy that her insurance coverage didn’t provide free contraceptives. She has “no choice” but to go without birth control, Fluke lamented. Another student “had to stop” using contraceptives because it was too expensive.

In other words, these poor women are being forced to have unprotected sex because of people like you who won’t pay for their birth control!

In truth, the only people being forced against their will are the ones required to pay for “health services” they are morally opposed to.

On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that 11- and 12-year-old boys be immunized routinely, along with girls, for the human papillomavirus (hpv)—the cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease. In order for the treatment to be “effective,” kids need to receive a total of three shots—each costing insurers $130. And they need to be vaccinated before they become sexually active. So schools in places like the District of Columbia and Virginia now require sixth graders to receive the std shots, unless their parents are clued in enough to “opt out.”

Last year, former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann warned about the “very serious side effects” of hpv vaccines. But she was quickly ridiculed into silence. Nothing to worry about here. All we need to know is that the drugs are “free”—and that teens can then have sex without having to worry about cancer.

Or pregnancy, in the case of other powerful drugs, like abortifacients. “Accidents Happen,” read yesterday’s headline at the Planned Parenthood website. “That’s why there’s the morning-after pill (emergency contraception).”

Note the carefully worded headline and subtitle. Illicit sex is an accident. And having an abortion after the “accident” isn’t murder. It’s contraception.

This is what the government wants to be made available to everyone in America—and on your dime.

And this, in essence, is what “sex education” amounts to in the radical anti-family establishment that now occupies the highest levels of American government.

“I’ve got two daughters—9 years old and 6 years old,” then Senator Obama said on the campaign trail back in 2008. “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby” (emphasis added throughout).

Punished—with a baby.

Once again, illicit sex is the accident, the baby is punishment and the remedy is government-sponsored abortions. This is why, as an Illinois senator, Mr. Obama voted against the partial-birth abortion ban and opposed a bill written to protect the life of a baby that managed to survive an abortion.

In his mind, it makes perfect sense. If teenage sex is an accident and an unwanted child is the punishment, infanticide is the solution.

“Yes, sex has overtaken the common sense of otherwise sober Americans and now even intrudes itself into our government, via the despotic mandates of legislation that was unwanted by the majority of its citizens and blatantly unconstitutional,” writes Lisa Fabrizio at the American Spectator. “One wonders what our Founding Fathers would have thought if confronted with the fact that in 21st-century America, sexual license would be included in the list of freedoms and inalienable rights to be protected and even funded by our government.”

Promoting everyone’s right—including that of young teenagers—to a consequence-free, illicit lifestyle of casual sex now trumps the constitutional right every American once had to practice his or her religious convictions.

And make no mistake, America’s government is the state religion when it comes to actively and aggressively promoting a sexually deviant lifestyle—a lifestyle that undermines everything God teaches about marriage, family and sex.

Planned Parenthood, for example, receives much of its funding from the U.S. government—and from young people, mostly, who are in search of contraceptives, std treatments and abortion procedures. In 2010, Planned Parenthood provided contraception for 3.6 million clients and performed 329,445 abortions.

What people generally do not realize about Planned Parenthood is that in order to get new customers to pay for these services, it actively recruits them. How? By earnestly encouraging people to indulge in illicit sexual activity as early as possible in life.

“Just as the goal of a drug dealer is to make drug addicts, Planned Parenthood’s goal is to make sex addicts—and they follow the same business model,” the American Life League recently reported in a 6-minute video exposé.

The “gateway drug” advertised by Planned Parenthood is masturbation. “It’s Perfectly Normal” is the title of one of its primary teaching tools—a book aimed directly at 10-year-olds. On its website, the “info for teens” section has all kinds of information about why masturbation is healthy, what to do if caught by parents, how to know if you’re ready to have sex with a partner and the options you have if there’s an unwanted pregnancy: abortion, adoption or parenting.

That’s the nanny state model for sex education in the 21st century: Get ‘em hooked on fornication when they’re young, and once you do, you’ve got a lifelong customer who will be totally dependent on the government. Customers like Sandra Fluke and friends.

The biblical model for sex education, as students of the Bible know well, is totally different. In the Bible, God says it is parents—not schools or government programs—who are primarily responsible for teaching their children about love, marriage and sex.

Here at Herbert W. Armstrong College, we have a sex education class. But it’s not meant to replace what our students should have received from their parents before college. It’s meant to supplement parental teaching and training.

Our primary textbook, as it should be for every parent, is The Missing Dimension in Sex. In it, Herbert W. Armstrong plainly revealed the God-ordained purpose behind sex—why He created it, why conjugal love is actually commanded within the bounds of holy matrimony and how it binds a husband and wife together as “one flesh.”

Furthermore, in his textbook, Mr. Armstrong revealed why all forms of sexual activity outside of marriage are expressly forbidden by God’s law and clearly defined as sin. God doesn’t issue these commands arbitrarily because He’s trying to deprive us of something that is good and pleasurable. He gives specific commands because, as Mr. Armstrong wrote in the textbook, “these violations rob us of joys and inflict automatic harm.”

God set these laws in motion in order to protect us—and to give us the radiant joys of a happy marriage and family bound together by unselfish love. God’s laws, as Mr. Armstrong wrote, are His gift to man!

If you are a parent, you have the sobering and weighty responsibility to vigilantly counteract Satan’s relentless attempts to pervert and sicken your child’s mind and body through sexually licentious behavior.

You also have the wonderful privilege of teaching your children about love, marriage and sex—the dimension that is missing from every school, government or “health services” program. The Missing Dimension in Sex is the indispensable tool you need to help you fulfill your God-given responsibility as a parent. It’s a 200-page book aimed at everyone—parents, teenage children, even 11- and 12-year-olds.

Incidentally, the shortest chapter in the book is the one on contraceptives. The reason for this is because Mr. Armstrong wanted teenagers to study his book. But he also knew that prior to marriage, teenagers did not have any “rightful and moral need of contraceptive knowledge.” Of course, he knew many of them would acquire improper knowledge on this subject from dirty sources.

Nevertheless, he explained, “I do not wish to encourage premarital sex by supplying such knowledge—and in this book it could serve such a purpose. Therefore I will say simply that married people who need such information may find it available in books that may be purchased at bookstores.”

Amen to that.