Marshall Brain's Blog

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The article is entitled Virginity pledgers' STDs not reduced. The basic message is that we have a group of teens in America who have publicly pledged to remain virgins until marriage. Yet they get sexually transmitted diseases at the same rate as teens who don't make the pledge. The reason?

''It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex,'' said Peter Bearman, chairman of Columbia University's sociology department, who coauthored the study with Hannah Bruckner of Yale University.

The teens who pledge to abstain fail to bring condoms when they go on a date, so they get lots of STDs when they end up having sex anyway.

That's not the unbelievable part, however. That actually makes sense once you think about it. The unbelievable part is this:

The study also found that 99 percent of nonpledgers and 88 percent of pledgers have sex before marriage.

If that is true, then this whole "abstinence" thing we are trying to drive into schools has a very long, uphill battle. Can you think of ANY other activity (besides breathing) that has a participation rate of 99 percent?