… seriously? I live in a ridiculously repressed Texas city. Basically, we have a guy named Ed Ainsworth (misogynistic fundie) screech and hiss about how girls just aren’t keeping their legs shut tight enough. He brings along a little basswood Wheel of Fortune: CONSEQUENCE! Edition. Of the eight slots, seven are STDs and STIs, pregnancy, whathaveyou. There’s a tiny sliver that says something about ‘home free’. Curiously enough, most of the time students spin it as part of his ‘sex talk’, they land on ‘home free’ for whatever reason. Huh. There’s a message.

And clearly it’s effective, because we have something to the tune of the 3rd highest teen pregnancy/STD rate in the nation. Not even just Texas, the WHOLE NATION. I’ll bet the rest are abstinence-only too. Every few years the health report card thing that channel 11 news does always, always shows a “continually high rate of STDs and STIs.”

In fact, it’s where “The Education of Shelby Knox” was about. Personally I haven’t seen it, but maybe you might want to. See, fundies? Even active Christians can side with the evil libruls.

Not helping that Fundie-In-Chief supports this, too. -sigh- one more year, one more year…

So, no. It wouldn’t work.

You know what? Can we compromise? When I was researching my latest victim a day or two ago, I came across a whole heap of misinformation about sex ed from Crazy Women Fundies of America (www.cwfa.org). They kept insisting we needed to teach “abstinence until marriage.” I would ALMOST be willing to strike a compromise with the fundies. “How about we teach abstinence until you’re ready for a mature relationship?” Can we do that? Maybe? I can think of no good reason to wait until marriage. It seems to serve no legitimate purpose that I can think of.

Of course, we’d need to teach birth control too (yes, including condoms). I don’t mind teaching failure rates. The ACTUAL failure rates, however, not some cockamamie, agenda-driven lie the fundies invented as a scare tactic.

Oh yes, and STIs? Yes, we know that on rare occasion, an STI can be passed despite condom use (and yes, I’m aware of herpes and HPV and the nonsense), so let’s compromise again. You fundies tell your scare stories, and I’ll just teach that you don’t have to worry about STIs if you’re not having sex with anybody who has an STI.

Would that work?