Paul Parant writing in Têtu takes a tone of exasperation that only now—25 years after the appearance of AIDS—has the French Ministry of Education announced that it will install condom dispensers in all lycées (high schools).1 But of course from across the Atlantic this looks like the wildest kind of radicalism.

In the United States high schoolers are humping like bunnies. Yet the government response in most states is to make sure there are no books about sex in the school library.

The existence of teenage sex in America has to be the world's worst kept secret. From morning to night our commercials hint of, leer at, toy with and suggest sex, yet manage to play it so that some teenagers (and probably some adults) still believe babies are delivered by stork. And for the religious in our society that is the preferred manner of dealing with the matter, though the Southern Baptists have taken a precautionary step for those advanced teenagers to whom the secret of sex was leaked—the Virginity Pledge.

But ignorance is always better. Here's an extreme case of innocence that came up recently in a court hearing. The hearing was to determine if a Fundamentalist Mormon pastor should stand trial as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old to marry her 19-year-old first cousin—

Bugden [the pastor's attorney] also claims the woman never explicitly told anyone that she was being raped and never used the word "sex" when she was questioned by police....

"The most specific she ever got was her husband did some things and touched her in places that made her uncomfortable," Bugden said....

Prosecutors countered that "sex" is not a culturally permitted term within the closed FLDS society.

"Sex" is not a culturally permitted term anywhere in our public life.

And meanwhile the French are putting condom dispensers in the high schools. You won't hear about it in the U.S. news. In order to report it, the media would have to figure out how to disguise the fact that it had something to do with teenage sex.

Related posts
The Christian Right, STDs, monogamy and other wonders (5/30/05)
Condoms 1 Right-Wing 0 (6/22/06)

Tags: * France healthcare public health sexual health high school lycée condoms contraception contraceptive highschool sex teenage teenager AIDS HIV STDs education sex education