Texas High School Says ‘No’ To Sex Ed, ‘Yes’ To Chlamydia Outbreak
Right now, about 7% of the high school’s students are reported to have a case of chlamydia, which is already 7% more chlamydia per high school than anyone would prefer. But since chlamydia is asymptomatic in upwards of half of women infected with it, who knows how many more kids are blithely unaware of what’s percolating in their innards? Maybe if they’d have had some, I don’t know, formal sex education, they’d be better aware of diseases like chlamydia and know what what to look out for, or to talk to their doctor about STD screenings, or that condoms can be used for more than making little tiny weird-shaped balloons. Maybe!
Of course I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir here–for most of us, looking at the situation at Crane High School is something of a “No shit, Sherlock” deal. But I want to talk to those with the anti-utilitarian viewpoint that providing sex ed to high school students is akin to plopping them down next to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil with a big neon “EAT EAT EAT” sign set up next to it. Now, I assume that for the most part, a stance against sex ed goes hand in hand with certain other collections of beliefs: the importance of the nuclear family, for example, and the idea that marriage is supposed to be about reproduction. Did you know that an undiagnosed and untreated case of chlamydia can cause scarring in a woman’s reproductive tract–which may cause her to become infertile? A raging outbreak of STDs might not trouble you, or maybe you even think it’s some kind of just punishment for kids who decide to get busy in the backseat of their car. But an infertility epidemic would put a serious damper on the Handmaid’s Tale fan-fiction version of society you’d like to create, wouldn’t it?
P.S. When I say we need sex education, I mean the kind where useful and accurate information is taught. If your version of sex ed includes “If you have sex you’ll die” or suggests that condoms fail more often than they work properly, that is sex mis-education, and we don’t want it.
(Image: Pupkis / Getty)