So 95% of all married Americans have had premarital sex, and this percentage doesn't show much change across generations. Now this is big news. Why it is big news should be bigger news in itself: Because this government is trying to micromanage the private behaviors of Americans, especially in terms of sexuality, and part of that micromanaging is giving recommendations to stay abstinent until the age of thirty at least, unless one is already married.
This recommendation is supposedly based on health grounds, to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. But sex within marriage can also give you sexually transmitted diseases if your partner brings them home, and strict health grounds shouldn't cause the recommendation to apply only to sex outside the marital bed. It's all about morality, of course, or about one specific type of morality based on one specific religious point of view.
Well, Wade Horn (the assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and also incidentally the guy who believes that what makes a family is a father) now pretends that the abstinence-for-adults program has nothing to do with feeding the wingnuts their daily quota of raw meat:
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.
"One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease."
He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.
"Absolutely not," Horn said. "The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults."
A nice bellylaugh I got from that last paragraph.
This may be a suitable place to point out that the liberal/progressive ethics on sex are not those of a pornographer. Or at least mine are not. My ethics on premarital or marital sex are really very simple, but they exist, and they are almost religious (heh): Don't do to others what you don't want done to you.
This means that all concerned people (including any partners you are planning to cheat) should be treated with respect, that there should be no coercing, that the feelings of all concerned people (see previous paragraph) should be considered and that the consequences, including health consequences, should be taken into account. All this even if you happen to married to the person you want to have sex with!
Now this should be good for some debate.