There’s good news and bad news to report today. The good news is that it’s nearly noon and Paula Houston still hasn’t asked me out for a little kiddie porn and popcorn. The bad news is that America’s sex education curriculum is about as effective as condoms manufactured by Firestone.
According to a report released by Surgeon General David Satcher, sex still isn’t all that safe. Satcher revealed that 45 million Americans have genital herpes, 900,000 people have HIV, 40,000 new AIDS cases were reported last year and 1.4 million abortions were performed last year—of which half were unwanted pregnancies—and 100,000 children were the victims of child sexual abuse.
Sometimes numbers can be, well, numbing. So, try the above from a different perspective: 45 million is four times more than the entire worldwide membership of the LDS church; 900,000 is half again more than the number of Civil War casualties, of which 40,000 occurred at Shiloh and Fredricksburg. Aborting 1.4 million fetuses equates to erasing the population of Salt Lake and Utah Counties, and half of that number is how many people will see 33 Utah Jazz ballgames live.
One hundred thousand? That’s about 99,000 more than the number of people who belong to the influential-beyond-their-actual-mass Eagle Forum. And those 1,000 people or so, like similar “Christian” or “Family” conservative groups around the country, are in a snit over the Satcher report. Why? Because that report violates three basic conservative tenets: First, Satcher is a Bill Clinton appointee and therefore, inherently degenerate. Second, Satcher failed to advocate abstinence-only until marriage sex education programs. Rather, Satcher says he “has to deal with reality” and his report encourages abstinence-only until one enters a “committed, enduring and mutually monogamous” relationship. One presumes that includes marriage, but try telling that to his arch-conservative critics who are calling for his ouster because he is a “liberal pawn.” They must have missed the part that encouraged “stable and committed adult relationships, particularly marriage, to help strengthen families.”
Third, Satcher all but called for putting on the gloves with such nuts, when he reported that there is no valid evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. To the homophobes of the far right, that position simply begs for inquisition. Certainly Satcher knows that if we can find a cure for the Black Plague we can find a cure for queers, doesn’t he?
And doesn’t he know that we’ve all become very comfortable in the knowledge that not only Jesus, but also Dave and Ricky Nelson, Beaver Cleaver, Opie, Betty, Bud and Kathy Anderson, the Coppertone Girl, Barney, Tom Barberi and the many children of Gayle Ruzicka were all beneficiaries of immaculate conception? Something is really wrong with this guy.
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