News of the Obvious: Teens like getting it on

The Washington Post reports: Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective.

Despite the demise of bands like Warrant and Poison, teens like getting it on, no matter who they promise they won’t — and they’re not always safe about it:

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

I’ve known for a long time that the only way to make abstinence work is to lock the teenager in your basement. Which reminds me, this will have to be a short piece as I have to take more Papa John’s and Fanta down to the basement. (Teens also eat a lot!)

Some other gems from the article:

“Previous studies would compare a mixture of apples and oranges,” Rosenbaum said. “I tried to pull out the apples and compare only the apples to other apples.”

Well, Dr Rosenbaum, we all know the kind of trouble that apples have been credited with starting.

This somewhat good news, that it may take more than a simple pledge to keep teens in the know about sex and its consequences received a befuddling reaction from the National Abstinence Education Association:

“Abstinence education programs provide accurate information on the level of protection offered through the typical use of condoms and contraception,” she [Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association ] said. “Students understand that while condoms may reduce the risk of infection and/or pregnancy, they do not remove the risk.”

The message here would seem to be that abstinence is best prevention, because if you can’t start the car, you can’t crash it. But if you’re going to drive, fuck the seatbelts because they’re not 100% foolproof.

If It Feels Good, Do It

I am often perplexed by other’s perplexity. In this particular case, it’s the oft-repeated, “I can’t see how science can explain where goodness comes from,” or “Evolution just can’t account for morality.”

Really?

Well, first, several good books explain the connection between evolutionary theory and morality (the last one I read was The Moral Sense, by James Q. Wilson), but even at an intuitive level, morality just makes sense when you consider humans are social by nature.

To ask the question, “Why be moral if there is no god?” Is to misunderstand that we don’t have a choice in whether we “should” or “shouldn’t” be moral — we are moral, and we are moral because we have had to be moral, otherwise we would not be here. Now there are clearly some folks who are “more moral” than others, but how do we judge what is more or less of a moral act?

Here’s a list. On the top is really bad stuff, and on the bottom is the not so bad…