Alienating my last reader

Students around the nation are promoting today as the Day of Purity to promote abstinence outside of marriage among teens. I don’t have a problem with encouraging sexual abstinence for teens because most are not mature enough to handle the ramifications. However, “purity” is an awful choice to describe this.

Mimicking my thoughts is this quote:

“The word ‘purity’ in this context is morally self-righteous,” said Alice Leeds, a spokeswoman for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “It’s redefining it in their context to conform to their frankly bigoted agenda.”

It’s too easy to throw words around instead of ideas, so I wouldn’t use “bigoted” to describe it. “Morally self-righteous” was correct. Misguided, too. Purity in this context implies that not engaging in sex is pure and engaging in sex is dirty. Generalizations won’t make the situation better.

Encouraging teens to have sex is not good policy. Pretending that teens don’t engage in sex is worse. As it’s taught here, it’s thought control with no more support than “Because we say so”. I didn’t like that argument as a kid and I know teens haven’t changed since then.

Consider this:

“A lot of girls feel that in order to keep their relationship, they have to have sex,” said Kelly Cruse, 16, who plans to pass out sexual abstinence literature at her high school in Illinois. “I think this need for acceptance is very destructive to a girl.”

Sex isn’t the issue in this example. Any girl who feels pressured to have sex, regardless of age, shouldn’t be engaging in sex. We need to teach children to have confidence and strength of character. We must treat children as people instead of owned things. When a child has that foundation, he/she will make quality choices. We’re too busy teaching them what to think that we overlook teaching them how to think.

Now that I’ve offered my thoughts, I present this picture. It’s so fundamentally stupid that I’m not going to comment.