Tag Archives: Sex Education

News

CDC report: Youths make up 1 in 4 new HIV cases

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From the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Teens and young adults now account for more than a quarter of the new cases of HIV identified in the United States annually, and a clear majority of those cases involve young gay or bisexual men, the federal government said in a major new survey Tuesday.

Of the nearly 48,000 new HIV cases identified in the United States in 2010, the latest year for which complete data are available, more than 12,000 involved teens and young adults, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found in its latest report.

About 72 percent of these new HIV cases in younger adults occurred in young men who are gay or bisexual, according to the CDC report.

[…]According to the CDC figures, black youths accounted for the largest share of new HIV cases, with Hispanic youths and white youths accounting for about 20 percent each.

About 1.1 million people are estimated to be living with HIV in the United States. Some 47,129 new HIV cases were identified in 2010.

The CDC’s new report, “Vital Signs: HIV Infection, Testing, Risk Behaviors Among Youths, United States,” estimated that youths aged 13 to 24 accounted for 12,200, or 26 percent, of new HIV infections in 2010.

Of these new cases, 7,000 were among black youths, 2,390 were among Hispanics, and 2,380 were among whites.

About 8,800 cases were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact.

HIV/AIDS is incurable, and an estimated 17,774 people with AIDS died in 2009. Some 619,000 persons have died of AIDS in the United States since the epidemic began in the early 1980s, according to the CDC.

Numbers like this should cause us to reconsider whether we should be encouraging behaviors that cause widespread disease and enormous health care costs. All we have to do is tell the truth – some things are morally wrong, and people should choose not do them. If they choose to do them anyway, let them pay the costs of their own decisions themselves. Why does government need to get involved to pay for some people’s choices, and not others? If people want to make poor choices, let them do it. But let’s not celebrate it or encourage it. Let’s not pay for it, because that just means we’ll get more of it.

News

Why is the Latino poverty rate going up?

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From the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

It has been reported recently that the poverty rate among Latinos has reached 28 percent.

The number, based on a new poverty measure by the Obama Administration, should be interpreted with caution, as explained here and here. However, the overall point that more American Latino families, and Americans in general, are struggling to achieve self-sufficiency is troubling.

What’s not mentioned in news reports, however, is the greatest driver of child poverty in the U.S. today: unwed childbearing. Among Latinos, unmarried parent families are roughly three times as likely to be poor as married families. Tragically, over half of Latino children born today are born outside of marriage. The rate has increased from less than 40 percent in the 1990s to more than half—nearly 53 percent—today.

These facts are rarely mentioned, and few attempts made to address the matter. Instead, big government proponents clamor that the antidote to poverty is greater government welfare spending. Unfortunately, these programs do not help people overcome poverty. Today, the U.S. spends roughly five times the amount necessary to pull every poor person out of poverty, and welfare is the fastest-growing part of government spending, exceeding even the cost of defense spending. However, poverty rates have not declined.

While welfare can provide temporary relief to those who have no other options, the vast majority of welfare programs are based on promoting government dependence rather than self-reliance. To pave the way to upward mobility, anti-poverty efforts should address the causes of poverty, such as family breakdown, not simply transfer material goods. Institutions of civil society—faith-based and community-based—are better suited to address the complexities of poverty, having a greater ability to reach individuals on a personal level.

Avoiding poverty in America is easy: you just have to finish high school, stay out of jail, get married before you have kids, stay married, and work at any job.

You just have to make the right choices, and that would be even easier if the government stopped rewarding people with taxpayer money for making the wrong choices – and then blaming others for their own poor decisions. People choose poverty, and they ought to be held responsible for it. If we really wanted to “help the poor”, then we would be increasing tax breaks for charity, for marrying and for working at any job – no matter how much it pays.

News

When government runs health care: NHS offers sex tips to children as young as 13

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Teenagers as young as 13 are being given explicit sexual advice and tips on how to lose their virginity from a taxpayer-funded website and iPhone app.

The respectyourself.info website contains graphic detail about various sexual acts – including those that involve a man physically abusing his partner during sex.

On the website, which is targeted at those as young as 13, teens can take an ‘Are you ready quiz’ and answer a series of multiple-choice questions to assess whether they are prepared to lose their virginity.

[…]A variety of degrading sexual acts are listed within it, with many too graphic to reproduce.

[…]The website and app, designed to cut teenage pregnancies, have been branded ‘grossly irresponsible’ by family charities.

The project, part-funded by the EU and Warwickshire County Council and designed by the NHS, is the first of its kind in the UK.

[…]The respectyourself.info website features sex tips for children as young as 13 and naked pictures of a man and a woman with their erogenous zones highlighted. There is also a ‘sextionary’ to describe slang terms for genitalia.

One section of the website – which is free to download and has been targeted at children as young as 13 – gives tips on anal and oral sex as well as losing your virginity.

This story reminds me of a line from Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”. He wrote: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. ” Sometimes I wonder whether all of this effort by the government to encourage things like sex education, no-fault divorce, recreational premarital sex, discouraging chivalry and traditional male roles, etc. is all just an effort to break up the relatively self-sufficient nuclear family unit. People who have a ton of sexual experience before marrying don’t have stable marriages nor do they have high quality marriages (see studies below). Breaking up future families is what creates the need for bigger government: more social programs, more welfare, more divorce courts, more public schools, more day care, more police, more regulation, etc. Less freedom. Less love. Less intimacy.

This sort of story is particularly disturbing for me, because I have paid a lot of money in taxes during career. I have kept myself chaste all this time so that I would be able to bond tightly to whichever woman I marry. Now I see that if I were in the UK, my tax money would be going to indoctrinate the women I could be married into a lifestyle that would make them unable to perform the roles of wife and mother – shrinking the pool of candidates that I can choose from. My earnings would be used by people who don’t agree with my goals and my values to wreck my plan for lifelong married love and a house filled with children. We shouldn’t be voting for the government to control things like health care or schools or helping the poor or anything. They just wreck it all with their own immoral agenda.

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