Loser

When I want to get ripped up, I have a few pints on a Friday afternoon with the boys, I have dinner with some more friends, and hope to sing a few at the karaoke pub near my place.

When Amy Winehouse wants to get ripped up, she does this:

1. Amy leaves home at 8.30pm on Tuesday night. She heads for a nearby pub frequented by musician friends.

2. At one point in the pub, Amy is handed what appears to be a joint of marijuana.

3. Emerging with Mick Whitnall, guitarist in Pete Doherty’s group Babyshambles, she visits a friend’s flat where she acquires a change of vests before heading for a nightclub.

4. At one point she emerges and tries to punch and headbutt a man in the street before buying the early editions of yesterday’s papers. While carrying the papers, a wobbly Winehouse runs into a lamp post.

5. Following the six-hour pub crawl, the 24-year-old drug addict breaks into her own home after losing her keys.

I don’t know who is more pathetic: Winehouse, or her degenerate friends who are going along for the ride.

How’s that sex ed treating you?

Strike another victory for sexual liberation:

As a result of Britain’s high teenage pregnancy rate – the worst in Europe – many women are becoming accustomed to looking after their grandchildren while still in their thirties – and without any sign of a husband.

The new phenomenon raises questions about the social consequences of generations of children being brought up without fathers.

The majority of the women involved don’t regret having babies but some who became parents in their teens told a BBC documentary they wished they had done things differently.

Miss Bailee, whose daughter became pregnant at 15, and has an eight-month-old daughter, said: “I put Rickeita on the Pill as soon as she started her periods at 12 or 13.

“It wasn’t a case of giving her permission to sleep around but you can’t lock a young girl in her bedroom 24/7.

“When she became pregnant I was upset, because she’s very clever and I wanted her to go to college first and get a good job.

“I’d had her at 20 and it was hard. I had to buy everything second-hand or make clothes myself.”

Thomas Sowell has long ago covered the sexual education racket in the West quite well. In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, Sowell relates:

As sex education programs spread widely through the American educational system during the 1970s, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-year-old females rose from approximately 68 per thousand in 1970 to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980. Among unmarried girls in the 15- to 17-year-old bracket, birth rates rose 29 percent between 1970 and 1984, despite a massive increase in abortions, which more than doubled in the same period. Among girls under 15, the number of abortions surpassed the number of live births by 1974.

[...]

Although sex education programs have been sold to the public, to Congress, and to education officials as ways of reducing such tanglible social ills as teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, many of the leaders of this movement have long had a more expansive agenda. [...] In short, however politically useful public concern about teenage pregnancy and venereal disease might be in obtaining government money and access to a captive audience in the public schools, the real goal was to change students’ attitudes—put bluntly, to brainwash them with the vision of the anointed, in order to supplant the values they had been taught at home. In the words of an article in the Journal of School Health, sex education presents “an exciting opportunity to develop new norms.”

I’m not into the conspiracy theories as much as Sowell—though he does have a point—and I’m not one to claim that sexual education should be taken out of school altogether. Learning the facts of human reproduction are important, especially when one hits puberty. (Why on earth a child before then ought to have to know about sex is beyond me, of course.) However, just because a child understands how their mechanics work doesn’t mean they should jump in the car and go for a lap around the speedway.

What was missing from my own experience in sexual education were the moral implications to having sex before I was psychologically mature to do so. I’m glad I was brought up in the church and was raised by parents who generally disapproved of sexual relations of teenagers, and although I’m probably still screwed up about sex (who isn’t?), at least I had that moral base upon which I would make my decisions regarding sex during my formative years.

The problem with leaving sexual education under the sole guises of the state is three-fold: First, you’re putting your trust in the government, and when has the government ever screwed up a social engineering project?

Second, in a secular nation such as ours, moral implications are only drawn to that of the lowest common denominator. We can all agree that murder is wrong, we usually all agree that vandalism is wrong, we have mixed feelings about different forms of illicit drug use, and there is a wide discrepancy among citizens for when a child may decide to take part in sex. I have my opinions, you have yours, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Therefore, in a government which tries to be all things to all citizens, it will usually opt for the path of least resistance, that being, we’ll try not to offend anyone by pushing any nosy morals in the mix.

Lastly, these are kids we’re talking about. They are seeking guidance, they need to know the boundaries, and they have to understand the consequences of their actions before they undertake them. A parent’s responsibility is to make sure their kid is ready to face the temptations of the world. While the church does help prepare these life lessons, it still falls to the parent to raise that child and prepare that kid properly.

To the woman in the above article who says that she can’t keep an eye on her child 24/7, I say raise your kid to take responsibility for herself before she goes out with her friends. Provide her with the moral tools so that when she does go off with her friends, she realizes that the choices she makes then will affect her for the rest of her life.

It isn’t going to stop teenage pregnancies or VD completely, but it’s better than letting a stranger teach the facts but not the lesson.