Ignorance is [Sexual] Bliss

Oh, articles like this make me feel all warm and bubbly and pregnant right inside. I feel as right as an evangelical zealot!

According to an article from The New Yorker, entitled "Red Sex, Blue Sex" teenagers having more sex than any other teenagers are (drum roll please) evangelicals! To top it off, they're (drum roll please) less likely to practice safer sex techniques!

Aww, who would have thunk it?

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

[...]

The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

[...]

But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor.

So, let's bring this back to sex education and/or the No on 8 Campaign - or what I like to call, "No on H8." Cute, right? The proof is in the pudding - those who are most concerned with protecting the sanctity of marriage are breaking all of their own rules themselves. Therefore, preventing same-sex marriage or refusing safe sex education has nothing to do with protecting marriage or the children!!, but has everything to do with hating gays, perpetuating inequality and a long-standing tradition of being afraid to talk about sex.

Great now that this is out in the open when one of those Yes on 8'ers, let's call them, "H8'ers," shout from the sidelines, "you're destroying the sanctity of marriage!" You can either say, or simply keep quiet and know the truth, that, "Actually it's YOU and YOUR red states that have the highest divorce and teenage pregnancy rates, so sanctity THIS!" To which their only defending reply would be, "Yeah, but despite the facts, we still hate gays and the thought of comprehensive safe sex education."

When Good Christians Take Digital Photos

"She's a Christian- She's a good kid...She just made a 7-figure deal..."
Loving how they sell "Christian."

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue - I Love Jesus More than You!

Wonderful input from an Andrew Sullivan reader:

I am really drawn in to your discussions of fundamentalism. It is an issue that my husband and I, as well as many colleagues, often find ourselves discussing. Why? We teach next door to a mega church and many of our families attend the church. We have seen numerous times where these children have upbraided their peers for not being "Christian enough", for not going to church where "they" do, and for not claiming Jesus as their personal savior. To say that this behavior disturbs us, is to put it mildly. The other day, another teacher found herself surrounded by a group of her 8 year olds calling her out on where she attends church, and what she believes. This event came after a year of one of her students frequently throwing out scripture verses aloud during class. This is not limited to students; many of our colleagues attend services there as well. Therefore, you will see a myriad of stickers affixed to the cars in our parking lot: "God is In Control" (guess that wraps up that Free Will debate) and "Not of this World" (funny, I thought God created this world for us) are the current favorites.

What I see are families who want certainty; to be told what to do and how to parent their children.

They don't seem capable of parenting on their own two feet, so they turn their families over to a finger wagging mega-church that tells their kids to go out and bear witness, to wear chastity rings, and to quote scripture without ever really looking at the development of the soul. Also, there is an air of exclusivity among the children. If you are not seen there during the weekend, or if you go trick or treating instead of going to the church carnival, or you don't attend the "Christian Club" meetings during lunch at the public school, then you are on the outs with the crowd, because you just don't love Jesus the right way. Further, the insistence on literal level thinking in regards to accepting the Bible as God's literal word, has bled into classroom practices. Many of our children see no need to think about the author's message of a text or to infer why someone might be feeling something in a given text, because if the author wanted you to think that about that, he/she would tell you directly, right?

I am looking forward for this trend to abate, and in the meantime, my family will be in the fourth pew from the back at our Catholic Church, living life in an uncertain world, comfortable with ambiguity and learning that the world is not black and white, and God probably doesn't want it that way!

I have witnessed something like this myself. Several of my jobs have taken me to the more rural parts of the south to work with teenagers and young people. Many of these teens, both boys and girls, had no problem disclosing aspects of their sex lives to me and the amount to which they drink and drug yet every time they feel as though they've said to much, they encapsulate their statements by saying, "oh but we're church going folk." Or, "Yeah, but we go to church so it's all good." As if their mere attending Sunday Mass is their get out of jail free card. They really feel this way, make no mistake about it. Since they attend church or simply say they believe in Jesus they carry an entitlement of being right or saved and do whatever they please. It's all pretty sick, ignorant and blatantly backwards yet they just don't/won't see it that way.

This Shit has to Stop

Matt Barber
Jesus loves you Matt!

In response to a recent outbreak of staph infection affecting gay men in major American cities Concerned Women for American spokesman Matt Barber has this to say:
(lifted from JMG)

Matt Barber: "The human body is quite callous in how it handles mistreatment and the perversion of its natural functions. When two men mimic the act of heterosexual intercourse with one another, they create an environment, a biological counterfeit, wherein disease can thrive. Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences.

"In recent years our culture has adopted a laissez faire attitude toward sexual deviancy. Television shows like Will and Grace glorify the homosexual lifestyle while our children are taught in schools that homosexuality is a perfectly healthy, alternative sexual 'orientation.' 'Stay out of our bedrooms!' we're often commanded by militant 'gay' activists.

"Well, now the dangerous and possibly deadly consequence of what occurs in those bedrooms is spilling over into the general population. It's not only frightening, it's infuriating.

"Citizens, especially parents, need to stand up and say, 'No More! We will no longer sit idly by while politically correct cultural elites endanger our children and larger communities through propagandist promotion of this demonstrably deadly lifestyle'. Why does it take a potentially deadly staph epidemic for people to acknowledge reality? Will that even do it? Enough is enough!"

HRC Executive Director Joe Solomnese responds:

"We've come to expect hysteria and gross distortions from an organization like this and normally their bigoted rants don't even warrant a response. But the statement today about MRSA is beyond the pale. In typical fashion, they disregard the facts and instead chose to demagogue the issue in order to fear-monger. Serious medical issues deserve serious consideration, not wildly off-the-mark press releases from anti-gay groups trying to capture media attention. We saw this kind of hysteria in the early 1980's around HIV/AIDS, I'll be damned if we will sit idly by in 2008 and let them perpetrate that type of anti-gay hysteria without calling them out on it."

Thank you for your words Joe. Gay men, get angry- you're allowed. This is YOUR life- YOUR existence too. Do not roll your eyes. Do not relax in complacency. Do not think someone else will do it for you.