If we expect teens to value chastity, they really will

By RICH LOWRY

FOR THE Left, it has long been as axiomatic as the third law of thermodynamics: Teenagers will have sex, and there’s nothing to be done about it. In the culture wars over sex education, this was always a hotly contested point, but now it has been proven indubitably false by a group of well-placed experts — teenagers themselves.

As The New York Times recently reported, the teen pregnancy rate “has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously reported in the United States.” The percentage of students in ninth through 12th grades who report ever having sexual intercourse has steadily decreased since 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control. More than half of male high-school students say they are virgins, a substantial increase from 39 percent in 1990.

The claim that sexual activity among teens was inevitable had an element of wishfulness to it. The country’s elites, wedded to an ethic of sexual liberation, were loath to imagine that anyone would forgo sex, let alone that teens should be urged to do so. Teenagers were thus enlisted as the sexual revolution’s youngest charges.

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An early debut in sexual activity can create a long-lasting pattern of unstable relationships. Girls who become sexually active at ages 13 or 14 are half as likely to be in stable marriages in their 30s than women who became sexually active in their early 20s. Delaying their age of sexual debut makes it less likely that they’ll be preyed upon by older men — most of the fathers in teen pregnancies are adults — and more likely they will get one of the most important questions in their lives — with whom to have sex and when — right.

The latest trends show that teens aren’t necessarily the problem. We are, in the way we have set expectations so low and told teens it is OK to give away their bodies, and their spirits, so easily.

http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=34329

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), March 12, 2004

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-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), March 12, 2004.

Oh, yea, President Bush is on the right side of this battle in the culture war too:

It was President George Bush, who has massively increased funding and support to the abstinence movement.

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), March 12, 2004.