Keep Your God Out of My Pants

There is a group called Club Varsity, which is a collection of speakers, athletes and entertainers whose stated goal is to influence young people positively. They go around to schools and church groups and preach the following message, “Life is not a game, yet many of the same principles can be applied to achieve success. When goals and standards are neither set nor encouraged, it is to be expected that youth will experiment in all types of "risky behaviors"—pre-marital sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence.” To facilitate this encouragement, you can purchase ATM cards or Abstinence Till Marriage pledge cards on their website for just 65 cents each(50 cents if you buy 3000 or more). These cards look just like real ATM cards, except they aren’t used to dispense cash; they are used to dispense promises.

I can’t fathom what goes thru the mind of someone who supports Abstinence-Only-Education; either it is ignorance, denial, self-righteousness, or a combination of the three. Sex is wonderful, fun, healthy and completely natural. But it also comes with responsibility, and can have nasty side effects like creepy crawly VD’s and babies. So lets clear up any misconceptions and start with ignorance on the subject.

A federal study showed that the MAJORITY of people have their first sexual experience in their teens. The National Center for Health Statistics found that about 57 percent of Americans had sex before age 18. The kids, they got urges, and they are doing something about ‘em. And studies are showing that kids are “experimenting” with sex at younger and younger ages. The kids are doing it even when you tell them not to. No one disagrees that abstinence is the only 100% sure way not to get VD or babies, but the reality is that people still have urges that they act on. Sex is the earliest of all traditions and all abstinence-only-education is, is the only 100% sure way to keep kids from knowing how to use a condom right.

This brings us to denial. NO ONE LIKES ABORTION OR STD’s!!! People who are pro-choice do not want more abortions. Abstinence-only-education is very popular among anti-abortion folks. These “keep it in your pantsers” rally for no sexual education and condoms for schools. If you really don’t want abortions, then why would you not use proven effective measures to lower them? Having free condoms available to teens coupled with comprehensive sexual education has been shown to lower teen pregnancy and STD rates. If you really want to stop abortions give 8^th graders condoms and show them how to use them. The reality is, as the Mathematica Policy Research Inc. said when they released an evaluation of four abstinence programs, that these programs don’t have an affect on teen’s sexual behavior. These programs don’t have an impact, and the lack of a positive result translates to negative one.

So after denial and ignorance there is nothing left to support these programs other than self-righteousness. The argument for abstinence comes from religion as does the argument to abstain until marriage. First it wrong to assume that marriage is at all better for every individual. The message of abstain-till-marriage is offensive to many hardworking single mothers, implying somehow that they are worse parents than those who have a ring on the finger. We have in this country, separation of Church and State for a reason, and abstinence only education, much like intelligent design is a thinly veiled religious argument. If you choose to ignore your prime evolutionary objective fine, but keep your god out of my bedroom and out of my pants. Federal Abstinence-only-education needs to end immediately before the next Brittney has a baby because Kevin didn’t have a condom.