Abstinence, it’s all the rage. And you know what we call young couples who rely on abstinence? That’s right, we call them parents. So it was that the abstinence only tide swept bottom feeding grifters high into the sweet hills of West Virginia this week, using the phrase God’s Plan for Sexual Purity (It seems God has a rather perverse interest in who puts their whats in where … or at least the people who speak for him do …) except one local high school girl wasn’t taking their nutty shit laying down. Naturally, her principal allegedly retaliated:
Think Progress — A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”George Washington High School recently hosted a conservative speaker,
Pam Stenzel, who travels around the country to advocate an abstinence-only approach to teen sexuality. Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire consequences for becoming sexually active. At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection.
Whenever I see this I always have to ask, were the dipshits that fan this nonsense ever teenagers? Did they ever make out hot and heavy in the back seat of an old Camaro or on the couch hoping parents and siblings didn’t wander by? Because if they had done that, even once, surely they would know this abstinence crap is doomed to fail.
But the stuff they did doesn’t count, because of fundamental attribution error. It’s perfectly natural for me to have sex, it’s only other people who are ungodly sluts.
I liked that Wellesley tweeted her to announce “not to worry” and that they were looking forward to seeing her in the fall. Nice fuck you to the principal.
Seems Campbell has made an excellent choice of secondary school in more ways than one.
“perverse interest”
Shouldn’t that be ‘prurient interest’??
They did that crap at my high school. It wasn’t the same woman presenting it. They brought in self-described “abstinence experts.”
I wish I had complained to the principal. I attended day one, but when I saw what bullshit it was, I refused to attend the next two days.
They’ve been doing this crap to students for years, and I hope that this puts an end to it.
There’s this famous negligence case in Canada where in a family of faith-healing types a teenager had Type 1 diabetes. They withheld the insulin (after getting a whole bunch of education about it and initially accepting it), and the kid ended up in the hospital. The mom in particular was rocked, b/c she had had a dream that the kid was cured, so obviously god sent the dream, and obviously it was necessary to stop the insulin, duh.
They go back home and everything is fine for a while and then they withhold the insulin again and the kid dies. They’re held responsible.
But here’s the thing: these people, they get exposed to the correct info all the time. Although the case above was a criminal case, there’s no reason in principle that you can’t sue these people if they provide factually incorrect information, in a school setting where kids are expected to learn and trust the info they’re receiving, and then harm is done. I mean, you can’t do it if that happens once. Verbal negligence has a ridiculously high standard – and rightly so. We don’t want to prosecute people for being stupid. But it’s worked before against white supremacists, for instance. She obviously knows the the point of the assemblies is for the students to remember what she says, trust that it’s accurate, and then act as if it’s true. If she actually does know that what she’s saying is false (and really, “I could look at any one of you…and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous”?), and if some false thing she says leads to harm (condoms aren’t safe ==> pregnancy or disease) when she’s perfectly aware that that thing is not true (this is the tricky part) or when a reasonable person in the position of the speaker would know that they aren’t true (for speech cases, “position of” would include things like “member of a conservative pentaoostal church,” or “strict 7th day adventist” or “devout agnostic” or whatever), then you have a situation analogous to cases that have been won before.
I don’t think you’re likely to get a jury to go your way, but there’s no reason in law it couldn’t. If there were such suits, and if the effect of such suits was that people who spoke to children in school, during school hours, were encouraged to provide accurate information, that would be a pretty good outcome.
Ah, fantasy life. You are so good to me.
Please clarify that statement. I find it ambiguous.
Were you referring to religion-soaked parents of teenagers deludedly assuming that “just say no to sex” and keeping kids ignorant will stop them?
Or were you referring to the teenagers who say, “Yes, mom and dad” and then go out and have sex anyway, ignorant of the consequences, thus becoming parents themselves?