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Religion and sex.
The New Yorker has a pretty good story on the enormous number of teen pregnancies among white evangelicals and the directions some evangelicals are trying to push to find a better way to deal with teen sexuality. "There hasn't been one evangelical family that hasn't gone through some sort of situation [like Bristol Palin]," says Marlys Popma, head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign. "In fact it was Popma's own `crisis pregnancy' that brought her into the movement in the first place."
At the same time, the article is critical of liberals, who may have a better record of avoiding teen pregnancy and whose marriages are much less likely to end in divorce, but who "are not very good at articulating their values on marriage and teen sexuality---indeed, they may feel that it's unseemly or judgmental to do so."
Your opinions?
Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
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[E]vangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
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The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota).
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As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.”
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The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.”
Perhaps the most interesting new piece of information for me was the finding that "chastity until marriage" pledges have been shown to work, but only if they're limited to a small number of teens:...
[E]vangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
...
The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota).
...
As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.”
...
The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.”
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority;once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
There are also good descriptions of young evangelicals, such as Shelby Knox, who are trying to move away from this failing model of sexuality and develop more functional, healthy ways for young Christians to develop healthy attitudes toward their sexuality without becoming promiscuous.At the same time, the article is critical of liberals, who may have a better record of avoiding teen pregnancy and whose marriages are much less likely to end in divorce, but who "are not very good at articulating their values on marriage and teen sexuality---indeed, they may feel that it's unseemly or judgmental to do so."
Your opinions?
Comments
No i'm not a brainwashed virgin lol
but seriously, this its one of the problems i have with the religious right wing.
problem solved
anyway.. i'm sure these religious sectors are coming from a good cause in trying to reduce the number of teen pregnancies.. but i just don't think it's possible without educating or telling them why..=\
i honestly feel bad for her.. as a girl who sleeps around you think she'll be the expert on stuff like this..
Wait, actually, that half works out. Hmmm...
Build the kids’ self-esteem; make them feel good about themselves.
If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who is going to dance in our strip clubs?
What’s going to happen to our porno industry?
These women don’t just grown on trees.
It takes lots of drunk dads missing dance recitals before you decide to blow a goat on the internet for fifty bucks.
And if that disappears, where does that leave me on a Friday night with my new high speed connection?
Yes, I do think that religion does have an influence but up to a certain age or until you realize you have raging hormones. I think there's a point in most peoples' lives when they discover they don't need religion or other things start to take priority. I think religion is always a thought in the back of a person's mind (if brought up religiously) and in time, will come back to re-discover religion and such.
This should be in the Debates forum!
:angel: