Sex Ed #fail

Public and charter schools in Washington, D.C. are adding “human sexuality, contraception and drug use” to standardized testing. If they did this in S.G., we’d have a 90 percent fail rate…. and the parents would be thrilled. So why is D.C. doing this?

A 2009 District study found that nearly half of the city’s chlamydia and gonorrhea diagnoses were among District residents 15 to 19 years old. Two-thirds of all diagnoses were among those younger than 24. Also, more than 3 percent of District residents older than 12 were living with HIV or AIDS in 2009, the report said.

Oops. Yeah, that’s a problem. Meanwhile, this just in from the National Partnership for Women & Families:

More young people worldwide are having unprotected sex, compared with three years ago, and they know less about contraception.

This is what happens when schools teach abstinence, and when people believe a purity ring is all a young woman needs to protect herself against pregnancy, VD and whoredom. Idiocy.

Meanwhile, I was heartened to see that even the those holier than thou (and moi) can’t pray away their hormonal urges in this piece on cnn.com, Why Young Christians Aren’t Waiting Anymore. To quote Hairspray, you can’t stop the beat — so why do the conservative or über-religious members of our species keep trying?

Look, I’m neither pro-abstinence nor pro-teen sex — I’m just pro-reality. There are a lot of us teens who haven’t had sex yet, have no prospects for doing so in the near future, and are just fine with that. But I damn sure want to know how to be responsible about it when the day does arrive, and I wish more people my age (and younger, god help us) who are already “doing it” did, too. Why isn’t the emphasis on sex as a normal part of the human experience, and what we can do to make that experience respectful and healthy (physically AND mentally)?

Aargh. Gotta get to class, where you can rest assured NO helpful information on this subject will infiltrate my brain and lead me down the road to Satanism and slatternliness. (Yes, it *is* a word — look it up!)