Sex educator Julie Sunday offers the following pithy summary of an analysis by Professors Kathrin Stanger-Hall and David Hall of state sex-education policies and rates of teen pregnancy and birth.

Sex education matters, yes, but access to services is more important. Teens do not have sex for the purpose of avoiding pregnancy--they have sex because sex is fun. If adults and policymakers want teenagers to use birth control, they will--but we have to teach them how to use it and help them figure out how to get it instead of erecting [heh] insurmountable barriers to keep them from avoiding pregnancy and spreading STIs.

Teen sexuality is like the Titanic--the ship is definitely going down. We can either play music and pretend we're not sinking or provide life jackets and get the people off the ship already. Considering that the House's recent budget proposal included renewed funding for the terrible, horrible, no good very bad Community Based Abstinence Education program (Read: federal government gives money to religious organizations to provide "education" in public schools and make cheesy PSAs), this country is still letting the ship sink without enough lifeboats for everyone.

Source: How to Have Sex in Texas

It's an interesting, sort of back-handed twist on the Titanic metaphor but I think that's about right.  The idea, incidentally, isn't to make birth control and sex safety materials available so that teenagers (or anyone else) will have sex, it's so that those materials will be available if or when they do.

Jed Lewison of Daily Kos nicely summarizes the recently announced resignation of extremist “family values” Congressman Mark Souder. One key point? Turns out the “interviewer” in a campaign-related video on the importance of promoting abstinence and chastity was Souder’s non-marital parter.

As you know, I’m usually very harsh about the twits-vs-substance nature of these scandals, where in people enjoy the schadenfreude of a public scold’s downfall for canoodling while missing the larger point. And I’m feeling pretty harsh about this time too because the substantive problem is that Rep. Souder is, or at least was, a major leader and shaper of legislation aimed at preventing precisely the behavior he engaged in. And the nature of his role pretty much implies that he knew, understood, had access to, and a professional as well as personal interest in applying the most current and most effective abstinence-promoting, chastity-keeping, and fidelity-maintaining methods known. And yet knowing what he knew, and having access to what he had, it still didn’t work for him! And so presumably whatever it was he was promoting, and legislating, would almost certainly be even less likely to work for people with less knowledge and less support. You want a scandal? Well that’s the scandal!

One other thing, by the way. One that really does deserve singling out Souder for hypocrisy. Lewison says (emphasis mine)

GOP Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana — the leading advocate for abstinence education in Congress —  will resign after an affair with one of his female staffers became public.

He said it here.

If Souder had had even an ounce of the integrity he doesn’t just demand but also legislates for, he’d have resigned before his affair became public.

See also: Acronym Replacement: It’s Not IOKIYAR, It’s IJNNWACDI (It’s Just Not News When A Conservative Does It)