Monday, April 07, 2008

Ignorance can kill

On Sunday - naturally - Katie came out against sex education. Katie is in favor of the "keep your pants on, Missy" approach to the problem:

Minnesota's soaring rate of sexually transmitted disease [STD] is in the news again. At the national level, a recent study found that 25 percent of 14- to 19-year-old girls have at least one of four common STDs.

The solution? Enlightened folks tell us it's more sex education, counseling and treatment. They call for more tax-funded initiatives such as a $1.3 million bill for screening and public education recently considered by the Minnesota Legislature.

But few are talking about the real reason for the epidemic: too many kids are having sex at too young an age.

And Katie has the statistics to back it up:

This idea [that kids are, in Katie's words, "going to do it"] is one of the biggest cons of our generation. At least one group understands this -- the 53 percent of high school students who reported that they had never had sexual intercourse in a 2005 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Empowering? Give me a break

The con about youth sex is rooted in the myth behind the sexual revolution: that sex without restraints -- doing what you feel -- is both liberating and fundamental to human happiness. But in our sex-saturated culture, the opposite is true for many young people. It's far from liberating to be at the mercy of frenzied adolescent impulses.

"High school" encompasses about the ages of fourteen to eighteen. Without looking at the data, Spot is quite confident in saying that the curve of the sexually-experienced increases when plotted against the age of the student.

Well, duh, Spotty. The likelihood that somebody has had sex increases as they get older? Thanks for the insight.

Don't be impertinent, grasshopper. Spot is just saying to consider the true meaning of the statistic that Katie quotes. For example if no one under seventeen in high school had sex, it would mean that everyone over that age had sex. And one has to wonder what percentage of those in the haven't column would be in the those who have column, given the opportunity.

But Spot, doesn't advocating abstinence and keeping kids in the dark about it discourage sexual activity?

Apparently not:

A survey of more than 2,000 teenagers carried out by a research company on behalf of Congress found that the half of the sample given abstinence-only education displayed exactly the same predilection for sex as those who had received conventional sex education in which contraception was discussed.

So then, boys and girls, here's the difference between Katie and Spot: Katie is apparently okay with the extra unplanned pregnancies, extra abortions, loss of fertility and maybe the loss of life that results from ignorance; she may even think it is just punishment for the offenders. Spot does not. Not for his pups; not for the neighbors' pups; not even for Katie's pups.

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