Of all the hair-brained policies we’ve had to endure as a nation over the past eight years, abstinence-only sex education has to be right near the top of the list. The idea that explaining the complexities of sexual reproduction and disease prevention will prove a greater aphrodisiac than exploding teenage hormones is logic at its most crocked. As a federally mandated ideological agenda item it’s shortsighted and asinine, and, as more than a few folks prognosticated, potentially harmful.
But really, how harmful did even the most cynical of us think it could be? Worst case is some kid misses the memo on condoms, goes happily philandering about, ends up like poor Telly from Kids and spends the rest of his life pissed at the world because no one bothered to give him a heads up. Don’t get me wrong, that’s bad, awful, tragic, but it betrays little more than a natural adolescent naivete about acts belonging to the province of adulthood. The real folly is that the no-sex-till-wedding-night set assumes that students somehow will glean the basics of the aforementioned complexities without the benefit of formal education.
What we’re seeing, however, is that deprived of proper guidance, kids will teach themselves with rules created apropos of whatever best suits their teenage sensibilities. To wit: Some teens in Florida believe that a shot of Mountain Dew or a puff of marijuana will prevent pregnancy. That’s not even the biggest doozy. A few think that drinking bleach will cure HIV. You certainly can’t fault them for their optimism.
Yes, this is Florida where people are already a little crazy. Any place unceasingly humid enough to turn the armpits of all your t-shirts an unsavory, sweat-induced ecru while spawning a circus freak retirement community, the spiritual center of Scientology and Pontiffville USA is bound to produce citizens wanting for mental salubrity. And yes, it’s also possible that this percentage of misguided youth are simply blithering idiots, beyond help even if Hippocrates, Sue Johanson and every AIDS researcher in Bethesda materialized in front of them for a straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip rap session about the horizontal hokey pokey and all its uncountable corollaries.
Or maybe, just maybe, all these kids need is a little education in easily digestible period-long bursts provided by their trusted school systems before suburban hoodoo becomes the norm. Thankfully, the states appear to be growing defiant of Washington’s ideologues, pushing for comprehensive sex ed curricula and ensuring that Clorox won’t post record profits on their watch.
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