ABSTINENCE

From Paul Harvey News and Comment

  Purposely I yield the floor for three minutes today to Robert Layton. The experience he relates is his own.

  “I got a notice from my 13 years old sons school announcing a parents meeting to review the new course on sexuality. Parents were invited to examine the curriculum and to participate in an actual lesson. When I got to the school I was surprised to see only about a dozen parents there.
  Waiting for the presentation I thumbed through page after page of instruction about the prevention of pregnancy, or disease but I saw only a passing reference to abstinence.
  So when the teacher arrived with the school nurse and asked if there were any questions I raised my hand and I asked why abstinence was not a pertinent part of the material.
  Mr. Harvey what happened next was shocking; laughter and I mean a great deal of laughter. Somebody said in the 1990’s there is no such thing as abstinence. The teacher and the nurse said nothing I was drowning in embarrassment my mind had gone blank I could think of nothing to say. I sat in silence for 20 minutes as the course was explained, and other parents seemed to like the course.
  Suddenly I heard the teacher say doughnuts in the back, and we were all invited to put on name tags, which were along side the doughnuts, and then we could mingle with the other parents.
  Everybody moved to the back and while they affixed name tags and began shaking hands I sat alone, deep in thought, ashamed that I had not been able to encourage a serious discussion of abstinence.
  I uttered a silence prayer for guidance.
  The teacher came over and politely invited me to join the others and enjoy the doughnuts. I said no thank you and the teacher said well don’t you want to wear a name tag the others would like to know who you are; and I said well I doubt that. I’ll just wait here.  When class was called back to order the teacher thanked everyone for putting on the name tags and said that now we would receive the same lesson that our children would be given.
  She said everyone peel off our name tag and look on the back. The teacher had said on one of the tags I drew a tiny flower. Now whose name tag includes the flower? A man raised his hand. The teacher said, Now that flower represents disease. Do you recall sir with whom you shook hands; and he pointed to two people. The teacher said very good.
  Now the handshake in this case is intimacy, so the two people with whom you had contact now have the disease.  Well there was laughter and joking among the parents until the teacher asked, with whom did the two of you shake hands?
  Well now she had made her point, and this she said is how to show students how quickly disease is spread. Since all had shaken hands all had the disease.  It was then that a still small voice told me to speak up. I rose from my chair I apologized for any upset I might have caused earlier; I congratulated the teacher on an excellent lesson, which certainly should impress young people.
  But might I add one small point I said, not all of us were infected. One of us… abstained.”

The pregnancy trap
By Gerry Garibaldi

Also from Paul Harvey
If I Were The Devil
From sometime in the 1990's