This week's poll from the Lester & Charlie Institute of Forward Thinking!
A few weeks ago, we told you about the insane things going on in Mississippi schools -- where teachers are complying with a law requiring sexual education by teaching girls that "anyone who has sex before marriage is no better than a used piece of chocolate." Yuck. What could be worse than that?
Well, death, for one.
Not to be outdone by the lunatic slut-shamers in good ol' Mississippi, police officers (yes, police officers!) in the great state of Nevada are trying excruciatingly hard to teach young girls that pre-marital sex leads directly to dismemberment, drug use, prostitution, rape ... even death. (Really! They have video of slutty girls being zipped into body bags to prove it!)
These "Choose Purity" events, which are co-sponsored by the North Las Vegas Metro Police and attended by parents and children alike, seem to have one goal: confuse the hell out of kids about sex. How? By throwing just about everything imaginable at them. They're showing videos of prostitutes dying from grisly STDs and girls who drop dead after abusing diet pills. They're playing interviews with pimps and prostitutes and drug addicts -- including a woman who lost limbs in a meth lab explosion and a man whose face got partially eaten by a drug addict. On a more chipper note, they also have a beauty pageant winner on hand to let girls feel "empowered" by trying on her crown.
The logic of the police officer who orchestrated the event was straightforward: Abstinence = crime prevention.
Not everyone agrees. "I don't know what is real about linking purity with those things," said a local health educator who attended the event and objected to the messages being sent to girls. Even worse, she pointed out, having all this disturbing information delivered by armed and uniformed cops made her wonder "if anybody came away with the idea that premarital sex is criminal."
In the interest of fairness, perhaps, the cops are planning a different event for boys: "Choose Courage." For girls, purity; for boys, courage. Well, we suppose it's too late to hope for any consistency here. And speaking of consistency, in case any of the girls in attendance weren't confused enough, the Southern Nevada Health District was also there to hand out condoms. What in the world are they thinking in Nevada?
All of this enormous effort by the Nevada cops probably won't even work to encourage abstinence. A study at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says that kids who take "virginity pledges" are just as likely as those who don't to have sex before marriage. Except the ones who take the pledge are less likely to have safe sex. Oops.
So clearly the cops in Nevada are going to have to up the ante if they want fear and confusion to keep their girls "pure." So how are they going to do it? What do YOU think?
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