I’ve got sex on my mind today.  It’s not because I’ve suddenly morphed into a 13 year old boy.  It’s because there are a lot of headlines today about sex, which also made me think about missing sex headlines and false sex headlines.

First, of course, the Herman Cain sex headlines:  Back in the 1990s, two women accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment when he was working at the National Restaurant Association, and the NRA subsequently settled the claims for five figure amounts.  I have several thoughts on this subject.  First, this story is not the same as the Anita Hill charges against Clarence Thomas.  Hill did not make her charges contemporaneously.  Instead, she emerged out of nowhere at just the right time for Democrats to conduct a high tech lynching against a high profile black conservative.  In this case, the charges were made at a time when Cain was just another executive.  The report is therefore more credible than Hill’s claims.

Peculiarly enough, though, at least from my lawyerly point of view, the fact that the charges date back to 1990 makes the charges less, rather than more, damning in my eyes.  Why?  Because the 1990s were a wonderful time for plaintiffs’ attorneys bringing sexual harassment charges.  Why?  Because the Ninth Circuit had just handed down a decision vastly expanding the definition of workplace sexual harassment.*  Suddenly, the claim made each lawsuit akin to shooting fish in a barrel.  Your female client didn’t get promoted?  Sexual harassment.  Your female client got fired?  Sexual harassment.  Your female client found the office “uncomfortable”?  Sexual harassment. Your female client was caught embezzling?  Sexual harassment.

Panicked executives (and their insurance companies) settled left and right.  Some of the claims involved genuine sexual harassers, but these legitimate claims were lost in the flurry of easy-money lawsuits.  Executives, their corporations and their insurance companies were simply loath to start rolling in the litigation mud.  The lawsuits (and I defended a few) were absolutely awful.  The executives were accused of heinous misdeeds, their every action was scrutinized, the corporation had to bear the burden of having every employee and every piece of paper in the corporation scrutinized, and the suits often morphed into class actions, which invariably primarily benefit the attorneys.  Valid claims (and I know there were valid claims) got lost in a sea of what amounted to legal blackmail.  So did Cain harass two employees?  Who knows.  The accusations are meaningless, as are the settlements.

The charges against Herman Cain got me thinking about the sex claims the major media is ignoring.  That would be the assaults that seem to be part and parcel of the Occupy movement.  So far, only the New York Post seems to be paying attention, both to the stories and to the cover-up.  Here’s just one example from a rash of similar stories:

A sex fiend barged into a woman’s tent and sexually assaulted her at around 6 a.m., said protesters, who chased him from the park.

“Pervert! Pervert! Get the f–k out!” said vigilante Occupiers, who never bothered to call the cops.

“They were shining flashlights in his face and yelling at him to leave,” said a woman who called herself Leslie, but refused to give her real name.

She said that weeks earlier another woman was raped.

“We don’t tell anyone,” she said. “We handle it internally. I said too much already.”

You would think that a story that’s all about sex would be front page, top of the news stuff, but it’s not.  The media knows its place, and its place does not include bad-mouthing the movement its president fomented.

My mentioning the president here isn’t a random, drive-by attack against Obama.  I was thinking of another series of alleged sexual attacks that took place when another president was in office.  As you may recall, when Hurricane Katrina struck, we were told that, within a mere three days of the disaster, New Orleans’ citizens weren’t just raping and murdering each other, they were eating each other too.  The MSM couldn’t get enough of reports about sexual assaults on Bush’s watch.  (Never mind that the City was officially under the aegis of Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin).  As far as I know, very few of those claims were true, and the cannibalism one was definitely a canard.

Sex sells, but as far as the media is concerned, it’s a product they want to market only when it can blacken Republican eyes.

_____________________________

*I’m pulling a complete blank right now on the standard the Ninth Circuit created, but when/if I remember, I’ll update the post to add that information.

UPDATE:  Rick, at Brutally Honest, remembers another sexual harassment charge that the media conveniently ignored.

UPDATE II:  Indigo Red figured it out:

Would the case you are blanking on, Book, be Ellison v. Brady (924 F.2d 872 (9th Cir. 1991) in which the 9th Circuit decided that it doesn’t matter if the alleged harasser intended to be harassing or complimentary rejecting the “reasonable person’ standard used by the trial court instead opting for a “reasonable woman” argument in which the alleged victim perceived the conduct severe and pervasive enough to change the work environment so as to create an offensive environment from which sexual harassment can be found?

We know two pivotal facts about Operation Fast & Furious, aka the Gunwalker scandal:

1. The U.S. Justice Department arranged for thousands of American weapons to cross our Southern border, knowingly placed them in Mexican criminal hands, and sat back and watched while hundreds of Mexicans and some Americans (including border patrol officers) were then killed with those guns.
2. Eric Holder, when asked about Operation Fast & Furious, lied under oath about what he knew and when he knew it.

What we also know is that the Obama White House has put pressure on the MSM to smother the story, and that the media has complied.  Even CBS, which was diligently covering the story thanks to the intrepid Sharyl Attkisson, seems to be clamping down on her to keep the White House happy.  In a normal world, these facts — lies, dishonesty, murder, cover-ups, media manipulation, etc. — would have the media baying for presidential blood, instead of falling into line with the cover-up.  But we don’t live in a normal world.

My first thought upon reading about media passivity in the face of a hot story was, “Well, of course.  Obama’s their guy.  They’re not going to cover it.”  My second thought was, “But they covered the Clinton scandal.”  Which led to my third thought, which was the difference between the two scandals:  SEX.

The MSM cannot resist sex.  Try as it might, the moment there’s a breath of sex spicing up what would otherwise be a dry scandal (especially a dry scandal involving the political party they love), they’re all over it.

The obvious answer is to infuse sex into the Operation Fast and Furious reporting.  You can see that I’ve made a start with the title of this blog post.  Just imagine if Bob Owens, who is offering the absolute best coverage of the Gunwalker (or Operation Fast and Furious) scandal, borrowed a page from the MSM, and lied outright to insert sex into the scandal.  With apologies to Bob, who is the soul of honor, truly, I’ve interlineated my own comments into just the first few paragraphs of one of his substantive reports on what should be a lead story in every media outlet in America:

For months, congressional investigators have battled a recalcitrant White House and Department of Justice over [sex allegations connected to] Operation Fast and Furious [Sex], a [sexual] conspiracy that had the apparent goal of sending thousands of guns [and prostitutes] from American gun stores [and brothels] into Mexico. Recovery of the guns [and prostitutes] could be used as evidence to support the Obama administration’s 90-percent lie — and perhaps even serve a more nefarious goal.

That deception [about the guns and prostitutes] seems to be collapsing, as the long suspected proof of other gunwalking [and sexual malfeasance] operations was confirmed by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News:

An administration source would not describe the Tucson OCDTF case. However, CBS News has learned that ATF’s Phoenix office led an operation out of Tucson called “Wide Receiver.” Sources claim ATF allowed guns [and hookers] to “walk” in that operation, much like Fast and Furious [Sex].

“Wide Receiver” joins Operation Fast and Furious [Sex] as the second named gunwalking [and prostitution] operation based in Arizona, but they do not appear to be the only gunwalking [and prostitution] operations that existed.

The White House has so far refused to answer inquires from Senator John Cornyn about two other suspected gunwalking [and prostitution] operations based out of the Houston and Dallas field operations areas. Additional gunwalking operations supplied drug gangs [and brothels] in Honduras from Florida, and supplied Chicago-area gangs [and brothels] from a gunwalking operation in Indiana.

Tawdry and dishonest?  Absolutely.  But I can guarantee you that the media and ordinary Americans would sit up and take notice if Fast and Furious wasn’t just about lying, cheating, and murder — at American Justice Department hands yet — but was, instead, about good old S-E-X.

This is an entirely  hypothetical scenario, because my daughter is only 12, and I’m not planning on her dating for at least another fifteen or twenty years, if not more.  However, the sad fact is that, contrary to my entirely reasonable wishes, the dating scene is going to start in three or four years — and that’s just the stuff I’ll know about and can control.  Thanks to the parent grapevine, I’m completely aware that the more precocious kids at my daughter’s middle school (meaning 12 through 14 year olds) are already getting into trouble with sex.

The school is trying its best.  When Valentine’s Day became too sexualized, the school simply canceled it.  Students are not allowed any Valentine’s Day observations on campus.  I don’t know how effective that cancellation has been, and I don’t know whether it happened before or after the two 8th grade girls were caught in the bathroom at a dance orally servicing a long line of boys, but I still appreciate that the school is trying.

You really can’t blame the children.  They live in a hyper-sexualized culture.  At home, I’m preaching self-respect and abstinence (and backing that up with classic movies in which the women were strong, charming and virginal), but at their schools, they’re discussing Lady GaGa (whose costumes are so revealing they’ve sparked rumors she’s a hermaphrodite); obscenity laden rap songs (which the 11 year olds know by heart); the fact that Miley Cyrus has become a “slut;” and the sexual escapades of John Edwards.  No matter what I do, my kids are exposed to a sexual morality I find disturbing and demeaning.  Fortunately my kids are still young enough to be disgusted by these various behaviors, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re being steered into thinking sex is simply a commodity, with anything short of actual intercourse falling into the “innocuous” category.

All of which explains why I’m so taken with Tim Tebow.  Here you have a young man who is handsome, charismatic, and an extraordinary athlete — and he’s also proud about saving himself for marriage.  Despite the manifest temptations that being a star athlete must present, he’s open about his virginity.  The jaded press may giggle in shock and embarrassment but I, as a mom, am deeply impressed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s so important about Tebow is that people cannot claim that he’s a virgin simply because he’s too pathetic to get a girl.  Instead, this moral dynamo is a virgin because he’s taken a principled stand that is inextricably intertwined with respect for himself, for the women he dates (and I assume he does date), and for the woman he will eventually marry.  I can’t think of a better lesson for young people.  And that’s why I want my daughter to date a man like Tebow:  someone who has principles every mother can love, and who, in a culture obsessed with sex, is proud of those principles.

Incidentally, despite the fact that 99% of the families in my ultra liberal community would draw back in revulsion at the thought of their child dating an evangelical Christian, I can guarantee you that 100% of them would be dancing on air if they knew that their daughter’s date, because of a deep commitment to and reverence for women and the sanctity of marriage, wasn’t trying to get his hands in their daughter’s pants.

I’m also very appreciative of the fact that Tebow’s sudden prominence outside of football circles (I, for example, wouldn’t have heard of him but for the Superbowl kerfuffle) coincides with a solid study showing that abstinence education is the best way to prevent kids from having sexual intercourse.  You and I have always understood that if you give kids step by step instructions, complete with condoms and cucumbers, in how to have sex, they might be inclined to have sex.  For the educated class, however, it took a vast study, complete with a large control group exposed to those condoms and cucumbers, to establish what we knew intuitively:  if you emphasize that our bodies are precious, that modern science cannot protect people from diseases and unplanned pregnancies, and that there is a deep measure of self-respect and respect for others that goes with abstinence, you will have healthier, safer children.

UPDATE:  And here comes the perfect example of the media’s constant desire to turn our children into sex objects.  These are twisted people who seek to validate their unsavory approach to life by co-opting our children.  People like Tim Tebow are vital to counteracting this cultural rot.

American feminists, who have done quite a number on Palin, are remarkably silent about the mind-boggling restrictions placed upon, and indignities visited upon, their sisters in Saudi Arabia:

A new prohibition may be added to the long list of those placed on women in Saudi Arabia: A new sentence according to Islamic law (fatwa) determines that women exiting the doorways of their homes must cover one of their eyes.

The array of prohibitions currently placed upon Saudi women includes forbiddance to leave home without a familial “patron,” fraternize with men in public, drive a car, put makeup on and wear high heels.

The modesty squad on the streets of Saudi Arabia follows women whose abaya (long cloak) is too tight and likely to reveal their curves or those whose hair is visible through their veils.

A senior religious cleric in the country, Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan demands that the rules of modesty be further enhanced.

In the new Islamic legal sentence, al-Habadan announced that when leaving their homes, women must keep only one eye revealed.

According to the sheikh, “revelation of both eyes behind the veil is likely to encourage women to put make-up on and accentuate their eyes. This is corrupt behavior which conflicts with Islamic principles.”

Read the rest here.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: A prescient friend of mine told me before 9/11 that the Muslim hatred of the Western world is grounded in the fear Muslim men have of female sexuality. Everything else — alcohol prohibitions, dog prohibitions, etc. — is just static. In apocalyptic fight between Islam and the West, it’s all about sex.  And in that regard, keep in mind that the incentive for Muslim men to commit suicide/mass murder is, yes, sex with those 70 luscious virgins (or, possibly, which will be a surprise to them, grapes).

Soccer Dad, who has a wonderful blog here, sent me a nice email agreeing with the points I made in my Biology will have its way post. He added an anecdote about Planned Parenthood: “The archdiocese of Baltimore announced that it would pay for counseling for women who had undergone abortions. Planned Parenthood objected. It was then that I realized that Planned Parenthood stood for a lot more than just freedom of choice. It stood for allowing women to be just as irresponsible as men could be. (I think that was a general point of yours.)”

First, he’s right that this Planned Parenthood story fits in perfectly with the point I was trying to make. Second, he sent me off on a rant about Planned Parenthood, abortion and the culture of teen sexuality that I thought was worth reprinting here:

I grew up very pro-Choice and still part ways with deep conservatives in that I’m unwilling to ban abortion entirely. What I’d like to do is change the culture. Hillary says “keep abortion safe, legal and rare,” but she doesn’t mean that last one, because she is unwilling to attack a sexual culture that inevitably means abortions will always be in demand.

Maybe I’m being incredibly stupid, but I do believe that if our culture stopped teaching high school, college and even middle school girls that not only does sex have no consequences but that it’s a necessary adjunct to the socialization, they’d stop having sex so much. If we went a step further, and said that self-respect, love, friendship and mature self-control all militate against jumping into bed, we’d have even less sex. In that social context, teaching matter-of-fact biology classes, akin to the ones I had when I was 14, which cover human reproduction and methods of contraception as part of that package, would not be incitements into bed. There wouldn’t be exciting and amusing demonstrations of candy-flavored multi-colored condoms being rolled over cucumbers. In my world, sex shows would stop coming to colleges, and Valentine’s Day would be about love and affection, and not about the Vagina Monologues.

I used to support Planned Parenthood when I believed that it was simply about helping adult woman make responsible choices about their sex lives. I’ve become very hostile to it now that I realize that it’s mission is to preserve the non-stop sex culture that rains down on our children.

As the mother of a 10 year old who is bombarded with nude pictures of Disney Stars, and Britney breakdowns, and Madonna kissing other women at awards shows, I loath the sex saturated culture we have become. I really wasn’t that aware of it before, because I came of age before it hit big time, and I didn’t have children in the right demographic until recently. Now that I see it, it disgusts me — and, as the parent of innocent, loving young children, it frightens me.

Soccer Dad was kind enough to send me the 199s article about Planned Parenthood, which I’m including here, below the fold:==============================

====================
Catholics launch assistance project for after abortion -
Lead priest says 1 in 3 women have post-traumatic

syndrome
==================================================
Sun, The (Baltimore, MD)-January 19, 1992
Author: Sheridan Lyons

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore will launch today at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen a program to offer spiritual and emotional counseling to women traumatized by abortion.

A steering committee for Project Rachel is being selected under a project director named by Archbishop William H. Keeler. The director, the Rev. Blair Paul Raum, 46-year-old pastor of St. Patrick’s Church on South Broadway, is a certified counselor who said he works outside the church as a family therapist.

He said yesterday that the archbishop would formally announce the project at the annual Respect Life Mass at 3 p.m. at the North Charles Street cathedral.

In an interview at St. Patrick’s, Father Raum said “a very conservative estimate” is that 30 percent of women who have abortions will suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, similar to the experiences of Vietnam War veterans, within 10 years of the procedure.

“With 30 million abortions since 1973, that’s 10 million women. There’s a lot of folks out there,” he said.

He acknowledged that the American Psychiatric Association does not recognize post-abortion stress syndrome, but said he believed the illness will be recognized as more women experience it and seek help.

James A. Guest, president of Planned Parenthood of Maryland, disagreed with that assessment last night, saying that the issue has been studied by the APA, the surgeon general and others “and there’s simply no credible evidence that this syndrome exists.”

“It looks like a group that’s vehemently opposed to abortion in the first place has invented a syndrome that doesn’t exist and attached a percentage to it that’s totally unsupported.”

But Father Raum said that studies showing women suffer no ill effects after abortions have focused only on the first year after the procedure. He added that “generally in the first years, she experiences a great deal of relief, because usually the abortion is had as the result of a crisis pregnancy.”

Next comes a period of denial, Father Raum said. “A very powerful defense, and she can move on and function very well.”

But, he said, “somewhere within that 10-year period, something breaks the denial: seeing a child that would be the same age; the anniversary of the due date; . . . the sound of a vacuum cleaner [if it was a suction abortion] and all this suppressed emotion begins to surface.”

The women begin showing signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome the way soldiers do, Father Raum said, through reliving the experience and suffering from sleeplessness and guilt that they survived while another died.

As a counselor, he said, he has seen 18 to 20 cases of post-abortion trauma in the past three or four years. He recalled, “Some women come and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about my abortion lately and it’s really bothering me.’ Others may not say it directly but are having problems with their marriages . . . and the root cause is that he wanted her to have an abortion.

“This is an issue at the very heart of being a woman,” the priest added.

He offered the example of a married woman who had had two abortions, six and seven years ago — the first because of marital problems that couldn’t take the additional strain of a child, and the second because she and her husband were both in school.

The woman experienced increasing tension with her husband, from whom she now is separated.

Then one Sunday during the Christmas season she was in church — which she had all but stopped attending. Father Raum said, “It was Christmas, a special season focused on the birth of a baby. She began to think about her children, the abortions . . . and her denial began to break and she began to feel a great deal of emotional distress.

“She decided to seek help with what she was feeling and a reconciliation with God, with the realization that what she had done was wrong.” The woman and he fasted and prayed, he said, and she celebrated the sacrament of reconciliation. She later planted a tree in memory of her aborted children.

Project Rachel — named in part for the biblical figure who mourned her children — began in 1984 in Milwaukee, he said.

The Catholic anti-abortion stance often makes a woman feel alienated from the church just when she may need spiritual comfort the most, Father Raum said yesterday. And belonging to a strongly anti-abortion denomination can be a factor in the post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But contrary to notions about damnation and excommunication, he said, “a good confession would forgive that sin [abortion].”

Although Baltimore’s Project Rachel will be a Catholic project at first, it will welcome clients of any faith. They will be referred either to a counselor or a priest.

Once the steering committee is appointed, he said, he plans to arrange for a toll-free telephone number to take confidential calls.

“For any woman who calls the line, we would attempt to address her need,” he said. “And we are looking down the line to expand beyond the Catholic Church, to offer more.”

Edition: FINAL
Section: NEWS
Page: 1B

Record Number: 1992019032
Copyright (c) 1992 The Baltimore Sun Company

UPDATE:  At American Thinker, Steven Warshawsky writes wonderfully — and sadly — about the degradation of sexuality as viewed through the prism of the Spitzer court papers.

One of the things the feminists insist upon is absolute equality, whether that means depriving men of the opportunity to participate in college sports simply because there aren’t enough women to create parity, something that’s now being done in the sciences as well; or allowing women to engage in sexual activity as if they were men. I’ve commented on that last point before in the context of the new type of rape claim, which has women getting themselves completely incapacitated through drugs or alcohol, falling into bed with a stranger and then later, when regret hits, crying rape (Laer calls this “gray rape”).

The fact is that, no matter what the feminists insist should be reality, when it comes to sex, women operate at a handicap level men don’t: historically, they were the ones who got pregnant. In modern times, we’ve been able to control that outcome, whether through birth control or abortions — both of which can be inconvenient, unpleasant or downright dangerous. Even removing or diminishing the inevitability of pregnancy, though, doesn’t do away with the hits nature imposes against women who step out too often sexually. It is women who suffer disproportionately from sexually transmitted diseases. As the African experience shows, when it comes to heterosexual sex, women are more vulnerable to HIV. Even without that scourge, women suffer more from sexually transmitted diseases: for men, chlamydia is a nothing; for women, it can create infertility, lead to greater vulnerability to HIV and, in pregnant women, put the child at risk. Likewise, for men, HPV (human papillomavirus) is an unsavory inconvenience; for women, it can be the trigger for cervical cancer.

Given the risks sex has for women — pregnancy, dangerous or emotionally devastating abortions, death in childbirth (a rather old-fashioned risk, but still a risk), HIV, infertility, and cancer — monogamous sex within a stable marriage is a great societal gift to women. I’m not talking, of course, about a situation in which the woman is expected to be monogamous, while her partner gets to do an Eliot Spitzer. That’s a dreadful situation, and Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen), whose husband infected her with syphilis, is the perfect example of the horrors of a one-sided demand for monogamy. Rather, I’m talking about the idealized relationship that sees a man and a woman meet, fall in love, get married and only then begin to have sex — with each other, and with no one else. It’s even okay if they meet, fall in love, have sex with each other only, get married, and continue to have sex with each other only. In our sex saturated society, where there’s always the promise of a new bedmate, this may sound a little dull, but it has its great compensations, for men and women both. Sexually variety is lessoned (which is, I think, a great hit to the men), but safety, affection, stability, and ease of access are all greatly increased. Even if it’s not always achievable, it should certainly be our goal.

The flip side of this idealized and increasingly arcane view of sexual relations is the new morality that tells girls that, if boys can sleep around, girls should be able to do so too. In the guise of equality, we’ve told our innocent young girls, girls who know only the world we offer them, that it’s just fine for them to “hook up” with a strange guy, have sex with multiple people, and basically to treat their health bodies as drive-throughs for men. Boys, of course, being nobody’s fools, willingly participate in this emotionally sterile culture.

If you’re curious about this degraded culture — one that is now the norm for American teenage girls and young women, and of course for the boys with whom they have sex — there are three excellent books on the subject. The first is Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which describes the raunch culture in which our young girls (and boys) are encouraged to live; the second is Carol Platt Liebau’s book Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, the title of which is self-explanatory; and the third is Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel, a novel describing a young college woman’s experiences in this nihilistic sexual jungle.

The problem for all the feminists, and the men who recognize a good thing when they see it (no strings sex), is that nature will bite back. And so today, we read that 1 in 4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease, with chlamydia and HPV topping the list. These diseases disproportionately affect African-American teens.

I’m willing to bet that, in the next few days, there will be articles about how this is Bush’s fault because he’s cut back on sex education. The fact that it’s African-American girls who bear the brunt of this epidemic means people will cite the usual culprits of racism and poverty, with the crackpots invariably claiming a Jewish plot. People will write that we need to improve birth control, that we need to improve sex education, that we need to improve screening for diseases, that we need to cut down on racism, that we need to spend government funds to fight poverty amongst African-Americans, and that we need to take the embarrassment factor out of sex so that teens will learn about birth control, disease prevention and disease treatment. (This last idea will, of course, be the most stupid, because it is the nature of ones teen years to live in an agony of embarrassment about everything. You can’t remove embarrassment, since it is the dominant underlying teen condition.)

The one thing no one will suggest, whether they’re coming from the MSM, the government, the liberal blogosphere, Hollywood, or anywhere else that has a loud voice across America, is that we start changing the culture, both among white and black teenagers. No one will suggest that movies and TV shows begin to do what was done in before the sexual revolution, which is to send out to teenagers the message that sex is for marriage and adults. Nothing in any medium will start to say that girls and boys should treat their bodies as something precious; that the sexual urge, although strong, can be controlled; and that there should be room in male/female relationships for love, affection and respect, all of which get pushed aside in the headlong rush for the bedroom. All that will happen is a shrill demand for more money to facilitate more teen sex — more sex education classes; more condoms that won’t get used; more clever advertisements about STDs, advertisements that teens will assiduously ignore; and ever more strident demands from the feminists and their opportunistic male fellow travelers that girls should approach sex in the same cavalier way that boys have been encouraged to view it.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey notes that the study was small — only 863 girls — and urges an expanded study to see if the numbers still hold. I agree with him. However, I think my points will hold up even if subsequent studies show that only 1/5 or 1/6 teenage girls suffers from STDs.

I also want to note in this update that I am not advocating a sharia like crackdown on young women and sexuality. I think that is an equally appalling way to go, premised as it is on a male fear of female sexuality and a profound lack of respect for women. They’re protected, not for their own good, but because Islam preaches that they are simultaneously dangerous and worthless. I envision a new social paradigm that says women are valuable and that we should be encouraging them to treat themselves in that way — and to be treated that way. They’re not just bodies for pleasure, but they are complex human beings made up of mind, body and soul, all of which should be treated with dignity.

UPDATE II: In England, what happens when you try to teach children morality along side sex ed and to remind them of religion in a religious school (not teach them, just remind them), is that you get hauled before Parliament as a fanatic (emphasis mine):

A Roman Catholic bishop will be forced to explain himself to MPs today over fears that he is imposing religious “fundamentalism” on children.

Patrick O’Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, will be questioned over his ban on what he calls “values-free” sex education in Catholic schools in his diocese and his order to put up crucifixes in every classroom.

His summons to appear before the House of Commons select committee on children, schools and families follows a 66-page document he produced last year which angered some MPs because of its strict line on sexual morality.

In the document, called Fit for Mission?, Bishop O’Donoghue wrote: “The secular view on sex outside marriage, artificial contraception, sexually transmitted disease, including HIV and Aids, and abortion, may not be presented as neutral information.”

He said “so-called” safe sex was based on the “deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against Aids”.

And he added: “Schools and colleges must not supuseful-port [sic] charities or groups that promote or fund anti-life policies, such as Red Nose Day and Amnesty International, which now advocates abortion.”

Although sex education is mandatory in all secondary schools, Bishop O’Donoghue insisted that in every lesson – even science classes – it must be taught solely in the context of “the sacrament of marriage”.

The bishop has been criticised by Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the schools select committee.

“A lot of taxpayers’ money is going into church schools and I think we should tease out what is happening here,” said Mr Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield.

“A group of bishops appear to be taking a much firmer line and I think it would be to call representatives in front of the committee to find out what is going on.

“It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith.

“But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked.

“It does become worrying when you get a new push from more fundamentalist bishops. This is taxpayers’ money after all.”

The bishop said yesterday that his document had been in response to pressure from parents.

“Many parents go to great lengths to bring up their children properly and they feel that schools are not cooperating with them as well as they should,” he added.

He said Whitehall’s sex education policies had failed and 30 years of “throwing condoms at children” had simply resulted in increasing levels of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.