from abstinence to saddlebacking

One of the blogs I read is Debra Haffner's "Sexuality and Religion: What's the Connection?". Friday, she wrote about President Obama (how I still love saying those words, even as he has become less a dream or a hype and more a reality to me and others) 2010 budget outline. To address teenage pregnancy, the budget "supports state, community-based, and faith-based efforts to reduce teen pregnancy using evidence based models. The program will fund models that stress the importance of abstinence while providing medically-accurate and age-appropriate information to youth who have already become sexually active".

That seems to me to be a very good idea. For a lot of people, abstinence is the only way to go. I respect that, I think it actually might be a good idea to wait (it's the "till marriage" part I'm not sure about - I'd rather see people wait till they're really ready for all the emotions and responsibilities that come with that terrain). But I also think it's important to be realistic. We know a lot of young people aren't waiting, and don't know the first thing about keeping themselves safe and healthy and pregnancy-free. So give them the message on abstinence, but also teach them their options.

The abstinence-only policy has resulted in some weird practices, including the phenomenon of (Christian) teens enthusiastically saddlebacking. I hardly think that was the intention..