The Scottish Government is planning to approve an official sexual health website that substitutes the word “Christ” with “sex” when issuing advice to young people on how to avoid risky behaviour as part of a safe sex campaign over Christmas.
A £100,000 campaign, entitled the Sexmas Survival Guide, will advise young people on navigating occasions like the “after-work do”, when, it is claimed, inhibitions will be relaxed. It advises festive partygoers to “slip a few condoms into your bag or pocket”.
Church leaders are claiming that the guide is inappropriate. Rev Alan Falconer, of Aberdeen's St Machar's Cathedral, said: “This detracts from the festival for it to be classified in this way”.
“The advice should be more respectful," said John Deighan, the parliamentary officer for the Catholic Church. “Using the word Christmas like that is symptomatic of a whole philosophy that undermines their safe-sex strategy. They don't show enough delicacy of language and they don't show enough respect.”
“This sort of approach trivialises sex and turns it into just another pastime when we should have a humanised vision of sex – that it is part of love and an intimate part of human relationships. The result of this sort of approach seems to be that things just get worse. The more you trivialise sex the more reckless people become,” he added.
The Scottish Government has defended the approach saying the guide would be rolled out again this year as part of efforts to promote “good sexual health”, the Government's spokeswoman said:
"But this is all about engaging with our target market."
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