But, here's the most telling part:
Teens who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as teens who don't make such promises -- and they're less likely to practice safe sex to prevent disease or pregnancy, a new study finds.At the bottom, this isn't about raging adolescent hormones. Nor is it a question about "self control" or any degree of "morality." Not in the least. The problem here is magical thinking, which is why all the wholesale repression of information that goes on in the name of "education" will ultimately cause more misery than (gasp!) actually treating sex as a subject for mature, rational, scientifically- and statistically-informed discussion.
Bottom line: Pledges of this kind are a cop-out, most especially for the parents who don't want the responsibility of raising sexually healthy young adults. Then too, they put another layer of immaturity between the teen and her/his responsibility to her/himself and her/his partner. And that, peeps, is most emphatically NOT the point of growing up. Apart from the human and social impacts of too-early parenthood, what particularly pisses me off about this magical thinking is that it's promulgated by the self-same tribe that continually bangs on about accountability and personal responsibility.
Gaaagh. The older I become, the less desire I have to replace the irony and hypocrisy meters blown out by the last decade or so...
