Another socialist blog

The official party line at Wal-Mart seems to be that educating people about HIV is bad.

Planned Parenthood of Central Washington was scheduled to hold an event at a local Wal-Mart on National HIV Testing Day where their Teen Council were simply going to stand outside of the store and hand out information about HIV prevention and testing. But the American Life League got a tip on the event, and urged their supporters to call and complain to the store, after which Wal-Mart succumbed and canceled the event.

Abstinence education has been the flagship of the religious right’s push to stamp out non-marital sex. Turns out that the skeptics were right. Having teenagers take a vow of virginity is ineffective at cutting the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teens.

But wait. There’s more. The problem with pushing abstinence instead of actually providing sex education, is of course that you end up with ignorant teenagers who can’t make informed decisions about sex. So the teens who took the virginity pledge, while abstaining from vaginal intercourse, were significantly more likely to engage in oral or anal sex. Six times more likely.

Bill Mahr predictably wanted to know, “Where were these pledges when I was in high school?”