Abstinence-only "education" is full of perverts

It's my pet theory that anyone this interested in the sex lives of the young and the single as to start an organization and tour the country telling young women that once you've had sex, you're used up like a lollipop must be a huge pervert. This article from Clevescene.com only confirms this. Every single person they interview who positions him or herself as an "educator" is a huge pervert.

For instance, there's evidence that these "educators" learn everything they know about the wooly world of unmarried sex from porn videos:

Petrie decided when she was 13 that she was going to wait until marriage. "I just always thought, 'I'm not giving this body to some random dude,'" she explains.

The concept of "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" is completely alien. It's either your husband or the pizza dude, apparently.

Snotty, superior-acting virgins advertise themselves more than prostitutes.

The abstinence conference feels like a flea market mated to a job fair. Vendors offer an array of anti-sex trinkets, from temporary tattoos saying, "I'm Worth Waiting For,"

How do you know?

to plastic virginity pledge cards reading, "A.T.M.: Abstinence 'Til Marriage."

Or until someone figures out your pin number.

One display borrows a line from junk e-mail, shouting, "LEARN HOW TO HAVE THE BEST SEX . . . by waiting till marriage!"

That's all but admitting that abstinence-only is as full of shit as spam emails.

His wife, Jen, also works for Operation Keepsake, as editor of an eight-page booklet titled Represent. Think Teen Vogue for virgins. A typical issue finds Jen tallying the sex partners for each fictional character on Friends.

"If Friends writers were really honest," the article concludes, "they would have tried this for a final episode: all six 'friends' sipping coffee at Central Perk, discussing the various STDs they've been exposed to . . ."

Yep, single people sit around tallying up their STD's while their friends are trying to eat breakfast. I do it all the time. And it makes great sitcom entertainment!

Now they have a happy, healthy sex life, untroubled by jealousy over previous partners. "In her mind, I'm the best sex in the world, because she has nothing to compare it to," Brock says.

The best part is she thinks "orgasm" is an STD so he doesn't have to exert an ounce of effort in that direction.

A year ago, Biddle's daughter, Amanda, returned from her honeymoon with her husband, Pete. He had a question for his new mother-in-law: "Are you the one I give this to?"

He held an abstinence pledge card, the one Amanda signed as a teenager. Pete was redeeming it, a symbol that Amanda had indeed waited until marriage.

Of course, that was after he photocopied it and handed it out to all the new friends he made in the hotel bar.

Abstinence the Better Choice Inc. was born. "When we first started going door-to-door, people were like, 'Yeah right, that's not going to work,'" she says.

Those people were right, of course. But in our brave new conservative world, there's no reason to let the truth get in the way of ideaology!

"I think they have a fatalistic approach," says Mary Ann Mosack, executive director of Operation Keepsake. "They capitulate to the lowest common denominator: 'Kids are going to have sex, and therefore they need to use condoms.' That's really the driving force: 'By all means, we have to get latex between them and the next partner!'"

The non-fatalistic approach, of course, is to make sure that there's nothing between teenagers and contracting potentially fatal illnesses.

"We try to empower them with assertiveness skills," she says. "We try to connect them with the fact that decisions do determine destiny."

To hang up the snark for a minute, this more than anything burns me up about the abstinence-only crowd is that they are always bleating about the "consequences" of premarital sex as if these consequences are mere acts of god that we have no control over, when of course the high rate of "consequences" are attributable to the lack of sex education and access to health services that the abstinence-only crowd has agitated for. They want to tell kids that "decisions determine destiny" while avoiding the fact that their decision to agitate for ignorance has determined our destiny as a country that's up to its neck in unplanned pregnancy, STD's, and HIV.

To make her case, she points to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The federally funded study examined a host of programs and found that virginity pledges delay the age of sexual initiation by as much as 18 months.

"That's significant," she says. "Is it ideal? No. But it could be the difference between finishing high school or not. It also reduces partners, which is the number-one risk factor in getting a sexually transmitted disease."

As far as I know, not using condoms is the number one risk factor.

But that glowing appraisal ignores the study's inconvenient facts. The authors also found that virgins who broke their vow were one-third less likely to use protection.

Whoops! Well, they're dead to us anyway, so they don't count.

As the event was drawing to a close, Huber offered a rallying cry: "Together we're going to make a difference here in Ohio and across the country!"

With that, the attendees walked out to a lobby bustling with men in tuxes, women in satin dresses, and tables heaped with flowers and gifts. Someone had booked a wedding reception at the same hotel. If the chastity crowd was looking for divine affirmation, it didn't get better than this.

The couple was surely virginal. As we all know, you can't get married if you're not a virgin. It's like the law or something in Ohio.