Column
By Mark Beardsley
The Numbers Are Clear: Our Policy Is A Huge Failure
According to a new study, 26 percent of U.S. teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease. Better than one in four.
An Associated Press story on the study, conducted in Chicago, said some doctors attribute that high percentage, in part, to the “abstinence only” approach to sex education in schools.
Locally, Jackson County still leads the health district and state in the percentage of women who have babies during their teen years. Health officials cite teen ignorance is a cause.
The same conundrum exists for both situations: One school of thought is to teach teens the value of sexual abstinence — if you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant or acquire a sexually transmitted disease. The other belief is that we must offer sex education as a fallback position for those kids who don’t buy into abstinence — 50 percent of high school students.
The abstinence only crowd says that teaching about birth control and the prevention of disease encourages teens to be sexually active. They’re probably right. But the sex ed group counters that failure to teach kids how to protect themselves dooms those who do not abstain to pregnancies and disease. They’re right too.
As we ponder this dilemma and argue the merits of sex ed vs. abstinence ed, the statistics demonstrate the failure of our policies. Kids are getting pregnant. They’re also getting infected in disturbing numbers with human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer; chlamydia, trichomoniasis and genital herpes. And let’s not forget the HIV virus, syphilis and gonorrhea.
Few parents think their teenagers are sexually active; it’s those other parents’ kids who do those things.
Right.
Twenty-six percent of our girls have an STD. We lead the league in babies born to teenagers. Abstinence-only, like the war in Iraq and the war on drugs, is a colossal failure.
Here’s why. Public policy may trumpet abstinence, but every other aspect of our culture pushes sex and sexuality. Blame it on Hollywood, the music industry, removal of prayer from the schools, Bill Clinton or greenhouse gases, but this culture equates sexual activity with popularity, success, self-fulfillment and self-esteem. We are bombarded daily by music, video, print and other messages, most subtle, some not, about the importance of being sexy. Sexuality sells cars, beer, toothpaste and every other product. The sexually attractive are the winners, and if you took away every product designed to make people more sexually appealing, the world economy would really tank. Sex sells — always has, always will, and the former governor of New York isn’t the only buyer.
It would be terrific if all kids realized they don’t have to be sexually active to be successful or popular, but the world is telling them something else. We need to provide kids with the information about the dangers of sex but also with data about preventing pregnancy and disease.
We know what happens when teens don’t have or use that information. The numbers are all too clear.
Mark Beardsley is the editor of The Commerce News. Contact him at mark@mainstreetnews.com.
We See Their Hyprocrisy; What About Our Own?
There’s something especially disturbing about corruption when it comes from someone whose reputation is based on fighting corruption. That could be former New York governor Eliot Spitzer or former Piedmont Judicial Circuit District Attorney Tim Madison.
Both made their reputations fighting the very sort of thing they were themselves doing — and both were highly regarded in the offices they held. But both succumbed to the illusion that their position and power protected them from discovery. Spitzer is humiliated and ruined. Madison too — and he’s serving a prison sentence.
How could a high-profile politician like Spitzer come to believe that he could escape discovery of a long-time relationship with a prostitute? What would make Madison rationally believe that he could permanently avoid discovery of his theft of public funds?
Few people would argue that Spitzer and Madison respectively did not get the punishments they deserve, but the damage in both cases is more emotional than concrete. Spitzer and Madison both broke the law, but more importantly, they violated the public’s trust. There is no suggestion to date that the New York governor misused public funds, while Madison’s theft is relatively minor from a dollar standpoint.
In contrast, we have a government which with deceit led this country into a war in which tens of thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been hurt and which destroyed America’s credibility in the world. We have leadership that continues to promote this war and teases about a similar war with Iran.
Which is more immoral — Spitzer’s dalliances with a prostitute, Madison’s theft or an illegitimate war in which casualties continue to mount and which is helping bankrupt this country? Why is the outrage, nationally in the Spitzer case and locally for Madison, so much greater than for a groundless, evil war?
Is it because 75 percent of the public and virtually all of Congress bought into the war at its inception? Or, is it because we still equate opposition to any war as a lack of patriotism? Why do we have a lower tolerance for immoral behavior related to sex and theft than for immorality that leads to countless deaths and injuries, torturing of prisoners, violation of human rights and abrogation of Constitutional rights?
What delights the public about the downfall of those like Spitzer and Madison is the exposure of their hypocrisy. But as long as the American public ignores the immorality of the Iraq war, its hypocrisy is far greater. And like Spitzer and Madison, we will one day pay its price.
Five years after we invaded Iraq on the pretexts of seeking weapons of mass destruction and a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction were located and no creditable link ever existed Hussein and Al-qaeda. All but the most delusional hawks concede that our pretexts for war were false, yet the war goes on, and we pretend that the men and women risking life and limb in this cause are “protecting our freedom” because we’re afraid to admit that this war was wrong from the outset and that we’re wasting those lives for nothing.
We can point our fingers in judgment and make jokes about Spitzer and Madison, but as long as we countenance the war in Iraq — whatever its eventual outcome may be — we expose our own immorality as far greater than that of two public officials brought down by their lust or greed. America was wrong to invade Iraq, and every life we spend or ruin trying to “win” a war that shouldn’t have happened just deepens our own national shame and hypocrisy.
Column
By Susan Harper
Rising Tide, Moving The Train
I’ve always loved the idea that “a rising tide floats all boats.” The implied even-handedness of it appeals to me, suggesting, as it seems to, that (for example) in an improving economy, everyone’s lot in life improves.
Recently, I’ve had a chance to think about that rising tide in a new way, as I experience people’s response to the Commerce Library’s good fortune.
As everyone surely knows by now, Dr. Neelagaru, our local cardiologist, has given $150,000 to the library’s Building Fund, bringing us within $75,000 of our goal — a goal that once seemed so far away that I referred to the climb up to it as Mount Kilimanjaro and pictured the goal itself as lost in the clouds. Now, suddenly, it seems within reach, if we keep trying.
Tricia Massey, our capital campaign chairman and now the president of the Commerce Public Library Foundation, has always believed that the goal was within reach, and I have learned a very great deal from her in the past year. She has taught me, by example, about trying, and then trying again, and then again. She makes me recall the famous exhortation of Winston Churchill’s: “Never give up. Never, never, never give up.” Pauline Kael once said of Diana Ross that she had a whim of iron. I would say that Tricia has a faith of tempered steel.
And of course we have all, as a community, been pushing the train up the hill (on the billboard in front of the library) for a year now. Everyone who has bought a brick in honor or in memory of someone or to mark a special occasion; everyone who has made a pledge or given a donation to the Building Fund; the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, who allocated SPLOST funding for our library expansion; everyone who has said “keep the change” when they made a photocopy; everyone who bought a quilt raffle ticket, or attended a fund-raising event; the children who held a trike-a-thon at the Methodist pre-kindergarten — all of these and many more have kept faith with us in the uphill journey.
So we were ready for a really great “leg up.” But to have it come from a quiet and unassuming member of the community who has worked hard throughout his life, who has saved quite a few lives here with his skills and careful care, and who modestly attributes his success to his hometown library in India — well, all of this has had quite an effect, I can honestly say.
The newly risen level of the Building Fund is a gift to the whole community, and people have stopped me on the street to tell me so. For one thing, it has given us hope. Folks say things like, “I believe we’ll make it now, don’t you?” For another thing, it has given us inspiration: the desire to give back, the sudden awareness of what influences in our own lives have made us who we are. But perhaps most of all, it has done what unexpected great gifts always do: It has lifted our spirits, and made us profoundly grateful. Thank you, Dr. Neel. You have now touched all of our hearts!
Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library.
