Reasons why

My lovely wife and I were outside yesterday doing some much needed maintenance to the house when I heard a public service announcement on the radio. It said that many young people are choosing to abstain from premarital sex. Well, that's great. I'm all for teenagers abstaining from sex.

The problem is that the speaker said that having sex "just to fit in" isn't good. Is that why people have sex? Maybe some girls and an even smaller number of boys would, but I think the folks who created this announcement are out of touch. Adolescence begins so much earlier than it used to, which means more time for the hormones to rage. Add an oversexed media to the mix, which the announcement mentioned, and you have ingredients for people wanting to have sex because of biology. Believe it or not, but people who have gone through puberty have this "programming" inside them that says, "Reproduce now, not later. Or, now and later would be okay too."

The key is to tell people that they must fight that "programming" until such a time as they are older and married. Frederica Mathews-Green has a solution for this problem that I don't quite agree with. She basically says the same thing I do except for the older part. Then again, I haven't heard many Eastern Orthodox folks talk about her much anymore. Sure, there are some teens who are just doing it to fit in. "It's mostly the girls" I can almost hear you say. Well, Dr. James Dobson was complaining once about girls calling boys and being too aggressive. So ... oh, never mind, that's a topic for a whole other blog let alone post. I just think we try to sanitize people or something.

My point is, telling teens not to drink alcohol or smoke pot just to fit in makes sense. There isn't a biological drive to chug cheap American beer or to do shots of cheap tequila. There isn't such a drive to smoke a joint either. Ignoring the fact that people do have a biological drive to reproduce and telling them "it isn't going to make you cool" is just downright dangerous.