‘Choose Purity’ Event Scares Kids Into Thinking Premarital Sex Leads To Prostitution, Meth Addiction
If I had a dollar for every religious weirdo who thought non-facts and scare tactics worked better than sex education, I would be a rich woman. That’s not how the world works, unfortunately, so I’m not a rich woman – I’m just sitting at my desk writing about all of these idiots. Las Vegas police co-sponsored an event last weekend called “Choose Purity,” in which they informed kids premarital sex can lead to rape, prostitution, and a life of losing your limbs to meth. They eloquently stated, girls who “get promiscuous” can wind up dead. Okay. Somehow I’ve managed to cheat death. I guess I’m just lucky.
From the Las Vegas Sun:
”Choose Purity” aimed to show young girls what can happen when they don’t wait until marriage to have sex, according to Officer Regina Coward, president of the Nevada Black Police Association, who said she’d been asked by her church, Victory Outreach Church, to create a community event to go along with its abstinence message.
So what does Coward say happens? Typically four things: sexual assault, gangs, drugs and prostitution.
Avoid sex and avoid those perils, Coward said.
Girls who “get promiscuous” can wind up dead? What kind of victim-blaming nonsense is this? That’s all we need; police officers sponsoring events that claim that it’s a woman’s own actions that lead to rape. I wonder what they tell victims who call for help: You’re lucky you were only raped. Stay on this slut-trajectory and you may lose your limbs to meth addiction or start giving five dollar blow jobs in the parking lot of The Palms. Now, what will you do to stop this from happening again, young lady?
The room of about 125 parents and children watched recorded interviews with a pimp and prostitutes, learned modern-day slavery exists in the form of the sex trade, and saw grisly images of people who’d suffered at the hands of hard drugs ”” such as a woman who’d lost limbs in a methamphetamine lab explosion and a man who’d had his face partially gnawed off by a meth user.
I have to tell you I am chuckling at the image of parents and their children watching this stuff. I don’t know why. I guess I have a dark sense of humor. No, that’s not it – it’s because this is totally ridiculous. All of these crimes are horrible, but pre-marital sex doesn’t cause any of them: “Wide-eyed youngsters watched as two girls gave dramatic performances told from the perspective of one girl who had died after abusing diet pills and one who had died after contracting a sexually transmitted disease as a prostitute. The monologues concluded with each girl getting on a gurney and into a body bag.” Sorry. This makes no sense.
I visited the Facebook page for the group that puts on these performances – The Toetag Monologues trying to get some idea behind the motivation for these performances. Their status updates gave me this:
We’re saving lives.
We recycle cans, bottles, and paper…help me recycle our kids.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but premarital sex doesn’t “cause” any of these things. Also, purity commitments are dumb and they don’t work. There was a voice of reason attending the event, Laura Deitsch, a health educator for a local reproductive health organization with more than two dozen years of experience had this to say about it:
”Drugs are real; sex trafficking is real. I don’t know what is real about linking purity with those things.” said Deitsch, who spent her time as an educator teaching comprehensive sex education in the juvenile justice system, charter schools and community centers. ”It was a hodgepodge of unrelated fear mongering.”
Ding! Ding! Ding! You are correct. Fear-mongering and useless abstinence pledges do nothing. Kids need real sex education. Then they can use the brains they were gifted with to make decisions about how to approach it – or not- safely and with knowledge.
(photo: @erics/ Shutterstock)
