I don't know about designing a better culture since there are always malcontents and unintended unforseen consequences but if you mean tolerating people you morally diasgree with then Moral Reletavism is helpful not harmful.
Actual moral relativists are the most
intolerant people around. However, they
redefine tolerance to basically mean indifference (and intolerance of any stricter moral standards than they prefer) so you wouldn't know it. the result is a defining down of morals to the point where they are whatever you want them to be. As history has shown, that is a recipe for social collapse.
The good news is it looks like now 2/3 are deciding to abstain from having sex with a partner until 19 as too distraction to their adolescent goals even in light of sex education and media sex advertizing.
Agreed, but the evidence suggests that sex education is irrelevant to that effort or, that trend is happening in spite of sex ed.
However the other 3rd aren't having unwanted babies.
That hasn't been my experience nor what the evidence I've observed has demonstrated. In fact, Charles Murray recently wrote a book documenting the rise in illegitimacy rates in the larger white community and a lot of the subcultural pathologies that have been unfortunately identified the thug culture that is so strong in the black community.
We are seeing a strong class structure developing for really the first time in this country that is happening not along economic lines (though it has consequences in that area) but along differing values. It is quite sad, but the agressive culture war against tradition has consequences.
When it comes from the government, sex ed is almost guaranteed to be value-neutral. But, like effective welfare, effective sex-ed can
not be value neutral. When it
is value neutral people plug in the values they
want to hear (not a good situation for teenagers to be in). This effectively means sex-ed only enables people to do what they want. But then, this is essentially what sex ed was designed to do...
Most youth still hold the same values of their parents... If we do not alter this pattern, if we don't resocialize... our system will decay.
-John Goodlad, "Report of Task Force C: Strategies for Change," in Schooling for the Future, a report to the president's Commission on Schools Finance, #9, 1971.
The regular churches do help the poor (some of whom may have been born into unwed poverty due to lack of contraception) but then there's the scoundrels in it for the money who don't get involved in politics
There are always going to be people who game the system. But the smaller the system is, the less prone it is to that flaw. In other words, larger, more alienated systems are more prone to be insulated from consequential feedback mechanisms and more prone to abuse. Political machines have been built around this for centuries. Under the guise of "helping the poor" or whatever other supposed "service" they provide, they never fix the problem but chase the symptom and only enable the problem allowing them a permanent system for political power.
Also, church provided welfare is not value-neutral and can actually help people off of poverty instead of simply enabling them.
