impleri

I decided to wait until certain “celebrities” had lost their limelight before breaching this subject.  Conservative evangelical arguments revolve around two things: sexual abstinence and anything not abortion.  However this leads to problems once reality sets in.  Perhaps the biggest campaign is an abstinence-only pledge.  However, very few evangelical teens actually follow through with this to marriage (source).  In fact, evangelical teens are no different than other teens regarding sexual practices with only one exception: evangelical teens delay their “debut” 18 months longer to age 16.  This combined with the push for abstinence-only education leads to evangelical teens not knowing how to effectively use contraception.  As a result, groups which have high abstinence-only pledge rates (read evangelical teen groups) also have higher rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies (source).  All of this leads to the conclusion that sexual education should be an important part of any teen’s upbringing.

A second strand in this discussion is the reaction on failure.  While many would believe that a family which pushes for abstinence-only would be devastated when a teen revealed her being pregnant, the opposite is the case.  Most evangelical families are nonchalant on hearing this news.  This eventually leads to early marriage, divorce, and other “dysfunctional” dynamics which society–particularly socially conservative society–abhors.  In othe words, conservative evangelicals tend to breed an environment which fosters the very things they abhor.