jesus loves syphilis

A key element of the preposterous, largely religion-backed, abstinence-only sex education programs that hundreds of millions of your and my tax dollars continue to fund is the "virginity pledge," which encourages students (as young as 9 years old) to pledge to wait until marriage to have sex.

Now, the findings of a large study authored by Janet E. Rosenbaum, a post-doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have just been published in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics.

And I'm sure you saw this coming:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

So lets follow the logic. God is all-knowing and all-powerful. And, according to his followers in the fantasy-based community (or at least the ones with enough clout to get these useless "education" programs funded by our government), he tells us that pretty much anything other than abstinence-only programs actively encourages kids to become sluts and nymphomaniacs. (Ever notice how it's always about the girls?)

But wait. God, being all-knowing, is fully aware that these programs don't work. Further, since he's all-powerful (and since everything that happens in the universe is the Will of God™ anyway), he clearly created them to be ineffective and to cause his young followers to use condoms less often than they otherwise might, thereby causing them to be more at risk for STDs than their unpledged brethren.

QED.