Abstinence only: Not teaching and calling it education

The Family Research Council trumpets abstinence only sex "education"


Promiscuity Leads the Pact

Despite the angst over fuel prices and the presidential race, rumors of a high school pregnancy pact are stealing headlines in America's largest newspapers

Yep! It's a major issue and should be treated with respect. For example, we probably shouldn't just sweep it under the rug and tell people "don't have sex, it's bad".

and prompting more parents to question what public education is teaching their children about sex.

Because we all know that the solution to any problem is ignorance!

During the 2007-08 school year, Joseph Sullivan, the principal of Massachusetts' Gloucester High School (GHS), noticed a serious spike in the number of girls who became pregnant during the school year. In an interview with Time, he admitted that the teen pregnancy rate had quadrupled at GHS, and he suspected that a group of sophomore girls agreed to "get pregnant and raise their babies together."

Interesting, if true. That would actually sound like a reasoned response to how to manage the pressures of being a parent - form a community and help each other. What would be wrong with that? Is helping each other a problem?

While the media is consumed with whether or not such a pact exists, the story raises far more troubling issues about the school's message on sexuality.

And now we get down to it! Yay!

If these students never struck an agreement, as Gloucester's Mayor Carolyn Kirk insists, we can presume at the very least that these 16-year-old girls thought it was acceptable to be sexually active and become pregnant.

God turned on the equipment to do so, right? Who are we to dispute His judgment?

And why wouldn't they? GHS's own policy encourages it.

If "encourage" means "doesn't vilify a teenager for not following bogus religious rules", then this is correct.

The school offers free on-site daycare for teen moms so that students can bring their babies to school.

As opposed to forcing the girls to drop out because they have to take care of their baby.

It also teaches "comprehensive" sex education to students in the ninth grade, just in time for high school.

So in the science classroom, we should give the kids all of the facts and let them decide. But in sex education, we should only teach them one thing and one thing only. And that thing should be the one thing that the entire species is hardwired not to do. Okay! Got it!

If the school is bending over backward to accommodate teen mothers and encouraging the promiscuity that leads to it,

Remember folks, "encourage" currently means "doesn't vilify a teenager for not following bogus religious rules". This recap courtesy of Webster! Rewriting the dictionary for over 200 years!

these girls would have no choice but to assume that premarital sex and motherhood are acceptable social norms.

Yep! No choice at all! No other places anywhere in the world that they could possibly get information about one of the largest life impacting choices they will ever make!

Parents? No way! They can't talk to them.

TV? Nope! Nothing about sex there!

Internet? Please! There's no sex on the internet! No chat rooms, no IMs, no blogs, no email, no text messages about it. Get serious!

Newspapers, magazines, libraries, et al? No way! These kids can barely read.

Friends? Yeesh! Who do you think is getting these girls pregnant?

Other family members? As if! They're all going to tell them just not to have sex!

There we go! We're fresh out of possibilities. Kids have no choice!

Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy said, "This is not a story about sex education." Of course it is! It just happens to be a story that liberals are trying to hide, as it confirms--once again--the failure of comprehensive sex education.

Yep! Complete failure! We didn't whip the pregnant girl down the middle of the street for the offense against God of having sex?!? We all fail! Our school had the audacity to teach teenagers about the very instincts that every single human being gets when they hit puberty?!? Clearly that's a horrible idea!

Planned Parenthood celebrated when Gov. Deval Patrick (D) refused the federal funds for abstinence programs in Massachusetts schools. Had he accepted the grant and encouraged schools like GHS to use it to teach sexual restraint, the storyline in this storied fishing village might have been different.

Certainly would have been different! They still would have had sex, but with abstinence only education they would have been branded evil, lying, stinking, traitors to their community as well!

Instead schools like Gloucester insist on promoting promiscuity over abstinence in direct contradiction of the wishes of 78 percent of parents (as expressed in a 2007 Zogby poll)

Note the lack of teenagers who were polled. It's pretty easy to say "no" when you're not the one giving anything up.

Like us, these parents don't understand what's wrong with telling kids to simply say "no." Isn't that the message we give them on other dangerous activities like drug and alcohol use?

So everyone is pre-programmed with a huge smoking drive and if we all didn't smoke the human race would end? Dude, your analogy needs some serious work. Try going after something that the human body really needs - like eating, for example.

We tell them not to smoke. And unlike sex education, we don't hand them filters and say "If you're going to light up, smoke safely."

Yeah, the smoking thing still isn't working. Did you get this one out of "Sucky Analogies to Use to Try to Confuse Idiots"? Or did it come from "1001 Lousy Analogies That Won't Work At All"?

Now that public schools are starting to reap what they've sown with the "just do it" mentality, states are scrambling to accommodate kids and their poor decision-making. On teen sex, it's time to stop treating the problem and start preventing it with the only birth control that is 100% effective--abstinence.

And we're finally to the crux of the issue. Abstaining from sex is 100% effective in avoiding sex. But Abstinence Only Sex Education is utterly proven to be a completely worthless pipe dream. It fails every study that it's been subjected to. More importantly it fails the basic precept of education: That we should be teaching the next generation what we know.

Abstinence Only education is, by definition, refusing to teach the subject that is claims to teach. That, my friends, is always going to be a bad idea.