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First, the (relatively) good news: Over half of teenagers remain virgins until at least 17. The bad news: 46% of teens 15-19 have had sex, 13% before age 15, 7% at age 13 or younger. Those numbers from the Guttmacher Institute refer only to vaginal intercourse. Factoring in other forms of sex would make the bad news numbers skyrocket.
Obviously, premature and pre-marital sexual relations are a serious social, not to mention moral, problem in the United States in the twenty first century. How we deal with the problem is critical to altering such behaviors and since parents are usually in denial and the last to know about their kids' sex lives, the responsibility in dealing with the issue often falls to schools.
Many schools are failing that responsibility.
Whether instructional sex education programs serve more to arouse curiosity and whet carnal appetites than they serve any other purpose is debatable and some schools have taken sex ed to a whole new level, downward.
It's always good to consider the source but one Massachusetts school district has come up with a policy of distributing condoms to students on request.
That's nothing new, of course. New York City and other big city school districts have been handing out condoms as if they were M&Ms on Halloween for years.
The Provincetown, MA district's innovation was to include elementary students on its condom gift list, an idea that has led to a mini-uproar among the less enlightened among us.
Roaring on the other side is one school official who believes the new policy requiring a student to ask for the prophylactic is too restrictive. I guess he'd prefer condoms be flavored, colored, and be distributed with every school lunch: [http://tiny.cc/oxq6c]
All the 4th, 5th, or 6th grader need do is visit the nurse's office and make a request. One hopes a kindergartner through third grader wouldn't even know what a condom is let alone how to use one but in Provincetown, you never know.
You see, as I said, consider the source: Provincetown, MA is a place that would appeal to a Barney Frank-type more than to family types, although many familes live there. For the obtuse who are still missing the point, Provincetown on Cape Cod is the gay capital of the northeast where a straight male had better watch his back, so to speak.
Homosexuals have gotten very health conscious of late and probably believe even second graders are "doing it." With that "progressive" influence in town, the new condom policy isn't that surprising although it's not known how many other school districts practice it.
Latest word, in the wake of the uproar, is that Provincetown is reconsidering its policy but no word on whether P Town will institute a crash course in abstinence instead.
Next: How Planned Parenthood took a sex ed class and turned it into a virtual X-rated porn site in America's Heartland.
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