Next They'll Be Wanting to Burn Them

[Esquilax]

Go ahead and give them sex ed and condoms. What people want to say is "we can't stop you, so protect yourself from disease and if you still happen to get pregnant Planned Parenthood is there to get you an abortion if you'd like."

You know why we should say that? Because it's true.

We really can't, stop kids from having sex: those that want to are going to anyway. Kids aren't vacuous portals that just internalize what their parents and teachers tell them; they're people just like us, only without the same level of rational decision making. Occasionally, they're going to make less than ideal decisions, and this is especially true when it comes to decisions made while aroused, which are never the most clear headed to begin with.

We can't stop teens from having sex, but what we can do is honestly educate them and put them in the best possible position to make sensible choices regarding sex. All abstinence education does is increase the burden of meaningless guilt regarding a natural act, and reinforce the idea that sex isn't something you can communicate with adults about. So you're not only doing more harm than good with abstinence education, but you're also closing off any potential avenues of communication with which to educate them in future. Great job.

Who knows? Maybe you're right about the schools' role in all this. It's really the responsibility of the parents. I was brought up to view sex as a loving experience between a husband and wife. Now most kids are brought up to view sex as something we do just like all the other animals and it's also really scary because you can catch some terrible disease, so be careful. That's pretty much how the schools will treat it if we can't recommend abstinence or any other moral advice.

Barring some very obvious lessons one can teach regarding consent and health and so on, why should there be a moral point to sex? What reason is there to treat sex as something other than a fun thing you can do, if done responsibly?

Just assuming that it's something else might work for you, but don't presume everyone else has your sexual hangups.