Did you read the unbiased and accurate headlines in all the papers this week? It seems a study has shown that abstinence-only sex education classes produce the exact same results that "comprehensive" sex education classes do. WOW! Why the heck have we been teaching them to screw like rabbits when that does not reduce the incidents of teen pregnancy and STDs any more than teaching them not to screw at all???

This is wrong in several ways. First, liberals haven't been teaching kids to “screw like rabbits”. Such a statement presupposes that teaching them comprehensive sex ed teaches them to have sex. It also assumes that teen sex is a negative. I'll get back to that. The liberals will claim that we’re not teaching them to screw like rabbits – they already were. They claim to only be teaching them how to screw like rabbits responsibly.

Yes, I do claim that.

Of course, the facts prove otherwise. Teen sexual activity has steadily increased over the last 50 years. Prior to that period, and for the millions of years since mankind crawled from the first caves, unmarried teen sex was rare. With the liberalization of society - begun, encouraged, abetted, and now enforced by liberals – came higher rates of STDs and teen pregnancy.

Note the switch here between teen sex, and unmarried teen sex. Clever, but that bait and switch is a distraction and assumes much. The truth is, as Tom stated, teens used to have sex with the blessings of society, as teens got married and started their adult lives sometimes as soon as puberty set in. One could just as easily say that it was the Conservative prudish society which pushed the acceptance of sex until later ages, and that this is in fact the problem. The body is ready but society isn't, in other words.

It's also factually wrong from another angle. Polygamy and such were common place if we trace Christianity back through the Jews and to their relevant regions of the world. In many other cultures, ancient Egypt for example, premarital sex was just fine. Their government, wisely enough, didn't really weigh in on private sexual matters between consenting people (though they did frown non-monogamous sex). It is the height of hubris to apply the modern American Christian notions of sex, marriage and the nuclear family to all of human kind for all of history. Sex and how people responded to sex, as well as the accepted rules, are in constant flux. In parts of the ancient West, it was acceptable for adult males to have homosexual sex with male minors, for example. In existing tribal cultures today, drug induced orgies are the order of the day before a big hunt or dangerous foray into the jungle, and so on, but I digress.

Getting back to the issue at hand, as a matter of fact, given that European countries have teens which have sex about as often as American kids, yet have far lower cases of abortion and teen pregnancy, and given that they have full comprehensive sex education starting at very early ages, I'd say it's time to adopt their model. One difference is they do not typically have any abstinence only education to confuse the issue and which ask kids to do the unnatural and the unreasonable.

As Tom agreed, teens have always had sex. The best we can do, at least from the government's point of view, is to minimize the damage. It isn't the sex that's bad, it's the broken homes resulting from young, uneducated, people trying to raise children, it is the increase in disease.

I doubt Tom Pain agrees with the stance of many of his Conservative buddies, as he's shown himself to be more liberal than he seemed in his latest article about this and other topics, but there are actually those who want to refrain from giving their kids the new cervical cancer vaccine just because it might send the message that “sex is now a bit safer”.

Hey, you, right-winger! It ain't about the sex, ok? The act of a man putting a penis into a vagina, in and of itself, is not immoral, it is among the most natural of human acts. Morality is breached, ethics are violated, when suffering is caused. This is the standard for modern ethics.

Since it's obvious that people will have sex when their bodies are ready, we can either adjust society to allow folks to marry much younger and make this commonplace, or we can follow the model that the other first world nations have adopted and focus our morality on suffering and damage control. The current American push for abstinence is to appease the specific dogma of certain religious sects. All things being equal, and given what the rest of that dogma entails, such as the attack on science and the discrimination of women and homosexuals, I'd say that other working models are clearly better choices.

It also seems that teen crime has increased over the last 50 years. We have violent children (I won’t limit it to teens) roaming the streets in gangs waging gun battles. We have Columbine and Virginia Tech and a dozen others. Our children are murdering, stealing, raping, and assaulting in unprecedented numbers. So, let’s take the liberal strategy and require mandatory murder education classes.

This is flawed for several reasons. First, again, it presupposes that the act of sex is the negative by comparing it to murder, that this is what a moral society wants to stop. No one would argue that murder is acceptable. None of the other first world countries, which are almost always more socially liberal, accept murder. In fact, they all have lower crime rates than we do.

This seems like a knee-jerk reaction, something often cast as being a liberal-response. Crime has slowly decreased in recent decades. The chances of anyone actually dying by getting shot at work or at school is fantastically low. Again, using real world models, I'd say the issue with American major cities, where most of our crime occurs, is that they do not follow the progressive standards of other countries. Government needs to step in and distribute money and resources based on need with SOME central planning. The free market cannot, by itself, solve all of the problems caused when very high concentrations of humans are asked to live together in close quarters. There is a direct link between poverty and education levels and crime. If we want large cities such as in Japan, where every single gun-death causes national outrage, instead of our daily murders, we should copy their and similar policies from other comparable nations. They seem to work, and they also happen to be what we could call liberal more often than not.

Two very clear similarities between both Cho and the Columbine murders were ridiculously easy access to guns, and teasing in High School. Conservatives generally oppose, thanks to their NRA attack-dog, even the slightest most sensible act of gun restriction, as well as what they've called “the feminization of men” in High Schools - the taming of some activities like dodge ball for example. Bullies help define the weak from the strong in the pecking order, we are told. The winners will strive above it, they claim.

If I were to give a knee jerk reaction of my own, I'd blame Conservatives for the shootings. I don't blame them, I blame the shooters. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to these sad cases, but I do cast partial blame, in terms of influence and in terms of the conditions around these events, on the herd mentality of High School, along with those pressures which reinforce that mentality, like tradition and religion.

While I do think we could stand a few more gun restrictions, I respect those who fight to uphold the Constitution, the NRA, the quasi-mirror of the ACLU (which I fully support, even when they protect, to my disgust, the rights of the KKK to march in costume). My view might seem paradoxical, but a thinking man's view of the world is never simple. Indeed, the liberal view is one of science, experiment, refining based on real world data, and nuance. I recommend it for everyone.

In general, there isn't a single facet of social conservatism which improves the human condition and works well in the real world. There isn't a single model of a socially conservative country we'd want to emulate, where Americans would want to live. In fact, there are no working models of a Conservative utopia, that magic combination of Biblical morals and free market radicalism. The evidence tells us that we must strive to become MORE socially liberal in order to reap the benefits that others now do. America has the resources to regain its progressive lead in the world – telling Conservatives to retreat to the dust-bin of history with their dogmatic and dated sexual views would be a good first step.

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