Honestly, I don’t get why anyone could possibly have anything against encouraging young folk to avoid having sex. It’s sort of like encouraging a driver never to crash his car.

But, y’know what? I bet you’d never give your car keys to a teenage who has never had so much as a driver’s ed course. I bet you’d want to make sure that the person you were entrusting with your car knows how to operate a clutch, and to stop at a red light. I bet you’d want to make sure he wouldn’t do rolling stops, and would keep his eyes open for pedestrians, and would yield at crosswalks, and use his turn signal. I bet you’d want all this not just to make sure you get your car back in one piece, but because you wouldn’t want him to have to be scraped off its innards after he plays chicken with a bus and loses.

I bet you’d tell him to buckle up.

And that’s why I have something against abstinence only education: you’re giving a young person the key to your car and you’re telling him “Don’t get in a car wreck!”

What does this pedal do? How does the wheel works? What about that button, this stalk? Naw, don’t worry about it, you don’t need to know: just don’t get in a car wreck, and everything’ll be fine.

Once again, there’s an article out about young peoples’ misunderstandings of how to use contraception:

Also, 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men said it is at least slightly likely they will have unprotected sex in the next three months — and it’s quite likely or extremely likely for 17 percent of women and 19 percent of men.

The discrepancy between both wanting to plan pregnancy and having unprotected sex may have something to do with a focus in recent years on abstinence-only education, said Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

“Abstinence-only curriculums have gone explicitly out of their way to teach misconceptions about contraception,” she said. “This generation of 20-somethings have missed many opportunities to get medically accurate and correct information.”

Many of the people surveyed said they did not know much about contraception to begin with — 63 percent said they knew little or nothing about birth control pills, and 30 percent said they had scant knowledge about condoms.

The numbers may reflect that while most people have heard of the pill and condoms, they have never been taught how to use the pill or where to get it, or how to put on a condom, said Dr. Yolanda Wimberly, assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an adolescent medicine specialist with Grady Health Systems in Atlanta, Georgia.

Myths about pregnancy and sexual activity continue to permeate circles of young people. For instance, 28 percent of men incorrectly believe they will get extra protection from wearing two condoms at once, a practice that actually leads to condom breakage. At the same time, 18 percent of men wrongly believe that having sex standing up reduces the chance that they will get a female partner pregnant.

These are the kinds of myths often heard in Wimberly’s office. Wimberly, who sees young people from age 12 to 30 about sexual health issues, commonly hears rumors like these that have spread among friends. Anecdotal evidence that a behavior is safe is sometimes more convincing for young adults than the recommendations of health professionals.

Hey, don’t worry, you’ll be fine driving, even if you’re only ever learned how to drive by watching your parents, and movies. Hey, little Jimmy from down the block? That’s how he learned: how many accidents has he had? None. See? You’ll be totally fine. Just drive like Jimmy, and don’t get in a car wreck.

Guess what: back in college, I knew a girl who bragged (I mean, not openly, but to a circle of mutual friends) that she’d never ever used protection during sex, and she’d never gotten pregnant, and never gotten an STD, and this is not a woman I would describe as chaste. Based on that: are you going to go without a condom the next time you’re getting horizontal?

The biggest (and sadly, the best) argument I’ve ever heard in favor of abstinence only education is something along the lines of, “If you teach people how to have safe sex, then they’ll have sex.” But the problem is that the argument assumes that if people don’t know how to have safe sex, they won’t have sex at all, and I think that’s pretty shortsighted.

And then there’s this gem of a quote:

“I don’t think we’ll be able to overcome this problem unless we restore the social norm of not having sex and not getting pregnant before marriage,” said Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council.

Y’know, I don’t actually believe that the social norm was ever not having sex until marriage. I think that may have been the ideal (probably still is), and the pretended norm, but c’mon: people are randy. It’s not like, before Woodstock, everyone was magically a virgin until marriage, and then afterwords, everyone started fucking like bunny rabbits for ever and ever and ever.