Mississippi has horrific rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, so they’re slowly waking up and realizing that they have to have better sex education in the schools … and they’ve actually adopted a sex-ed curriculum in some of their school districts. Unfortunately, it’s not what most of us would consider good education.
Marie Barnard was delighted when, after decades of silence on the topic, Mississippi passed a law requiring school districts to teach sex education. But the lesson involving the Peppermint Pattie wasn’t what she had in mind for her sons.
The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.
"They’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex — that she’s been used," said Barnard, who works in public health. "That shouldn’t be the lesson we send kids about sex."
Oh, no! I’ve been having sex for about 40 years now, so I pictured a piece of candy — in my case, a Tootsie Roll — getting passed around and stuffed into various damp places and given a hot shower every day, for forty years, and I’m sorry, it didn’t even make it a week before it had melted away and gone down the drain. Now I’m having castration anxiety.
Wait! It only applies to girls? What a relief, for me, at least — my wife is going to be dismayed, though. Maybe we can change the message a bit: lady bits are just like a piece of sweet chocolate candy that never ever disappears, no matter how much you nibble on it.
Unfortunately, the dirty scary chocolate trick still doesn’t work. The outcomes they want to prevent are actually being worsened by their evasive silly little abstinence-only games. So they have a new threat that they make:
Johnson thought he had made a good case for contraception education when he shared disturbing statistics: The local birthrate was 73 out of 1,000 females between 15 and 19; the national rate is 29.4 per 1,000.
He encountered the usual gasps of shock when he revealed that the rate of chlamydia, at 1,346.8 per 100,000 people, was nearly double the rest of Mississippi, and approaching triple the U.S. rate.
But later Johnson got a call from someone who had attended the board meeting — telling him that people who have sex before marriage don’t go to heaven. The board voted for abstinence-only.
Apparently, most of the state of Mississippi is damned to hell, so why is anyone paying attention to those sinners?