http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1214046,00.htmlThe flame of sexual liberation may soon have to be kept alive by us geriatric delinquents. A US evangelical group has announced that next month it will be recruiting British teenagers to its campaign against sex before marriage. In the States, more than a million have taken the pledge. "Great Britain," the organiser insists, "is fascinated with the idea of sexual abstinence." In my day such a fellow would have been horsewhipped. Yet young people are flocking to him. Is there no end to the depravity of today's youth?
Not if the US government can help it. The abstinence campaign that hopes to corrupt the morals of our once proud nation - a group called the Silver Ring Thing - has so far received $700,000 from George Bush, as part of his campaign to replace sex education with Victorian values. This year he doubled the federal budget for virginity training, to $270m. In terms of participation, his programme is working. In every other respect it's a catastrophe.
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The two western countries at the top of the disaster league, the United States and the United Kingdom, are those in which conservative campaigns are among the strongest and sex education and access to contraception are among the weakest. The US, the UN Population Fund's figures show, is the only rich nation stuck in the middle of the third world block, with 53 births per 1,000 teenagers - a record worse than those of India, the Philippines and Rwanda. The UK comes next with 20. The nations the conservatives would place at the top of the list are clumped at the bottom. Germany and Norway produce 11 babies per 1,000 teenagers, Finland eight, Sweden and Denmark seven and the Netherlands five.
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The catastrophe afflicting so many teenagers in Britain and America, in other words, has been caused not by liberal teachers, liberated parents and Marie Stopes International, but by those who campaign against early sex education, discourage access to contraceptives and agitate against the social inclusion (income equality, the welfare state) that offers young women better prospects than getting knocked up. Abstinence campaigns such as the Silver Ring Thing do delay sexual activity, but when their victims are sucked into the cesspool (nearly all eventually are), they are, according to a study at Columbia University, around one-third less likely to use contraceptives, as they are not "prepared for an experience that they have promised to forgo". The result, a paper published in the British Medical Journal shows, is that abstinence programmes are "associated with an increase in the number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants". You read that right: abstinence training increases the rate of teenage pregnancy.
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Breathtaking as this deception is, it's not half as bad as what Bush has been up to. When his cherished abstinence programmes failed to reduce the rate of teenage births, he instructed the US Centres for Disease Control to stop gathering data. He also forced them to drop their project identifying the sex education programmes that work, after they found that none of the successful ones were "abstinence only". Bush should also hope that we don't look too closely at his record as governor of Texas. He spent $10m on abstinence campaigns there, with the result that Texas has the fourth-highest rate of HIV infection in the union, and the slowest decline of any state in the birth rate among 15- to 17-year-olds.
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drag them kicking and screaming from the white house
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