abstinece-only sex education

how many must die for your "we'll wait and see?"

While promiscuity is obviously a factor in transmission rates, the mere 'opportunity for transmission' is not sufficient to account for the emergence of new diseases. And what makes you so sure they are so ”new’. Maybe what has increased is our ability to detect what previously passed unnoticed. Chlamydia might fit in this scenario. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest ”promiscuity’ only became rampant in the 70’s and 80’s. It has a history as old as humanity itself, as others have pointed out.

But I am still trying to absorb the implication of this statement. Could it possibly be that you have accepted the concept that diseases can "evolve"? I mean especially the ”new’ diseases you contend have arisen - wouldn’t these qualify as new ”species’?

Faith, diseases ARE business as usual in biology.

Faith writes:
. it is variations on this attitude that have been driving the promiscuity

I can tell what is an ”unnatural philosophy’ - the idea that human beings should completely repress their sexual urges precisely at that time in their life when they are learning about how to enjoy them for the first time. THAT’s unnatural and runs counter to everything biological, and that’s why it won’t work.

Is your goal simply to demonize sex or to reduce the incidence of pre and extra marital sex?

"Microevolution," o unhappy term, was well known before Darwin.

Faith writes:
The abstinence-only people are the only ones who see the handwriting on the wall and hope to head off the coming disaster...

I'll take from it then that you do not realize that abstinance only programs do indeed withold information (That IS the meaning of the word only in this context). I'm glad to be able to better inform you of that fact, then.

That this is an issue is strange to me. Kids are taught the basic functions of parts of their body like the eyes or the stomach and no one bats an eyelash. Kids are taught how other kinds of diseases are spread and no one breaks out into a sweat.What's wrong with teaching kids what their bodies are doing, what they will do, what they could do in the case of their genitals?

quote:

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The life problems you are describing are way beyond the scope of any sex education program. You needed a personal counselor about a lot more than sex.

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Pot, Kettle, Black

We have no problem putting a quaranteen on people with some kind of fatal flu even though it is their personal medical information yet a potentially malicious person could keep their HIV, HPV, Herpes status secret under the guys of dr patient confidentiality.

Do you have a source or a link for this claim?

Fourteen years and more than 300,000 deaths ago, Peter Collier and I wrote a story for California magazine about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. At the time the virus had not yet been isolated and there had been only 3,000 fatalities nationally. But it was already clear to the medical community that the culprit was a retrovirus, that there might never be a cure, that AIDS cases among gays were doubling every six months and that if the behavioral patterns of gays and drug users did not change, there would be more than 300,000 people dead by 1997.In normal circumstances, the minimal public health response to an impending epidemic would have been to identify the carriers of the disease by mandatory testing of at-risk communities, closing off "hot zones" of the epidemic, such as gay bathhouses and drug "shooting galleries," contact-tracing of those who had been in touch with the already sick and honest public education about the dangers of promiscuous anal sex among gays and needle-sharing among drug addicts.None of these measures, Collier and I found, was acceptable to a powerful lobby of gay activists that labeled them as "discriminatory" and "homophobic" and made clear to any public health official who advocated them that they would be doing so at the risk of their careers. As a result, none of the standard public health measures were consistently deployed. Instead, a series of politically correct ideas and "community-approved" policies became the only measures feasible for political leaders to advocate, for the media to promote and for public health agencies to pursue.

Oh yeah. You have some sterling credentials behind this citation.
David Horowitz, a little pseudo-nazi, 'anti-intellectual-elitism', failed-academic-himself, right wing extremist hypocrite who wants to prosecute 'left-wing professors' who actually HAVE academic credentials.Another pathetic little shill for the christian right who is doing more harm than good for the cause freedom in this country - in his case freedom of speech.