While some on the leftside of the aisle send out high fives to Portland, Maine because
the truth is that girls and boys aged 11, 12, 13, and 14 years are hooking up, performing oral sex, and having intercourse.
… so what can a school do but hand out The Pill to girls who still play with Barbie? Just think of the business opportunities for Ortho to market a chewable, bubblegum-flavored pill to 11 year olds!
On the other hand, schools have no problem under the selective “zero tolerance” nonsense to enforce their own political agenda
DENNIS TOWNSHIP: A second-grader’s artistic effort has got him in trouble.
Seven-year-old Kyle Walker was suspended for one day last week by school officials in Cape May County for drawing a stick figure shooting a gun.
His mother told The Press of Atlantic City that officials at Dennis Township Primary School told her the drawing violated a zero-tolerance policy for guns. Shirley McDevitt said the boy told her the drawing showed a water gun and not a firearm.
Four kindergarten boys were suspended in 2000 for playing cops and robbers, even though they were using their fingers as guns.
Love them priorities!
Comment by happyfeet on 10/21 @ 11:40 am #
That piece Dan linked yesterday is more interesting when you consider that the “all priests are pedophiles” meme has been so damaging to private schooling that it’s surprising that the AP would turnabout and universalize the problem, but clearly it’s a lost cause to look for public schools to have any role in inculcating good values. Well, unless you count recycling.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 10/21 @ 12:15 pm #
Dave Barry once wrote that if a group of little girls were placed on an island alone they would make a society; if little boys were they would all argue over the stick that looked like a gun.
Pingback by Ghillie Suits » Silly Season - guns vs The Pill [Darleen Click] on 10/21 @ 12:34 pm #
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt by school officials in Cape May County for drawing a stick figure shooting a gun. His mother told… a water gun and not a firearm. Four kindergarten boys were suspended in 2000 for playing cops [...]
Comment by Mark on 10/21 @ 12:40 pm #
How can anyone take the school nitwits seriously? I would have my kids out of the public screwel system pronto. What a bunch of fudgepacking morons.
Comment by Mike C. on 10/21 @ 12:41 pm #
From a practical perspective a school issuing pre-teen girls the pill is absolutely insane. There are grown women who are unable to use it for medical reasons. Add to that introducing to a girl at that stage of development something that is designed to alter the user’s body chemistry. For people that are so seemingly concerned about potential liability to approve such a policy boggles the mind.
Comment by psychologizer on 10/21 @ 12:44 pm #
I think it’s safe to postulate that Dave Barry never met any little girls, and that his imaginings re: little boys fighting over a gun-shaped stick are an ill-filtered pedophilic confession.
SWAT team, please.
Comment by Pablo on 10/21 @ 1:00 pm #
I weep for our deeply idiotic nation.
Comment by Bilby on 10/21 @ 1:12 pm #
It’s that familiar form of reasoning that suggests if there’s a problem, such as 11 year olds having sex, the solution isn’t to find out why and try to stop it, but simply to make sure it’s safe. To do more would be passing moral judgment.
Similar thinking was used in regard to back alley abortions in pre-Roe days. It was a terrible problem, but instead of trying to figure out just what drives women to such desperation, it was decided the only problem was that abortion wasn’t safe and legal.
You can go down the line on the issues and see the same thinking; most recently with the SCHIP scam. The operating premise is that since there are uninsured children, the only solution is to give them socialized medicine, without considering why private insurance is so expensive or any of the other causes given for people not having insurance.
Comment by Nathan on 10/21 @ 1:36 pm #
But…it’s policies like this that have brought school violence down so much in the last few decades!!!
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/21 @ 2:06 pm #
Why don’t they bring in hand mirrors and teach the little girls masturbation techniques and that they don’t need boys if they don’t want them. Get them indoctrinated into the whole feminist agenda before they hit puberty. I think the parents would react just as positively to that.
Comment by Lazar on 10/21 @ 2:21 pm #
Puritanism is the great mind killer.
Compulsion is a recourse of an incompetent and lazy teacher.
More fun, less violence.
Comment by B Moe on 10/21 @ 4:25 pm #
Just replace all the Ridalin with heroine and they will all be too fucked up to fuck. Two birds with one stone.
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/21 @ 4:34 pm #
B Moe – If it were San Francisco, the city could help them out there too. The little darlings could get birth control without parental notification, go to a city operated shooting gallery and get high on heroin under medical supervision, then screw like rabbits.
Behold the wonders of progressivism!
Comment by MMShillelagh on 10/21 @ 5:24 pm #
We. Are. SO. Hosed.
Comment by The Sanity Inspector on 10/21 @ 6:00 pm #
So now you know where all the picked-last-for-kickball types in school ended up. In charge of the nation’s children, the better to wreak their revenge. But judge not, lest ye be judged judgemental.
Comment by ccs on 10/21 @ 6:33 pm #
blah blah cold dead fingers yada yada yada
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/21 @ 6:56 pm #
I wonder if the Maineiacs have read about the trends in STI’s in California among the young. There the young are just assumed to be sexually active according to the articles I read and sex ed is therefore focused on contraception. Teaching abstinence is forbidden, a dirty word, so to speak.
“According to a study published last month in the Californian Journal of Health Promotion, there were 1.1 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among young Californians in 2005, the California Catholic reports.
The figure is ten times higher than previously believed. If the study is accurate, diseases such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, HPV, and HIV now infect almost one out of four Californians in the 15-24 age group.”
“According to Chris Weinkopf, editorial-page editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, state law prohibits ‘abstinence-only’ education in public schools. California has also refused to accept millions of dollars in federal funding for abstinence education.”
Comment by Darleen on 10/21 @ 8:09 pm #
daley
and you know the kicker? Age of consent in CA is 18 y/o. Sexual contact for minors is illegal (though the determination of filing – misdemeanor or felony – comes with a lot of other factors, including the age span between the individuals)
Comment by nk on 10/21 @ 8:12 pm #
I’m not somebody who looks for trouble but if they did that to my little girl they’d get personally sued, with an allegation that it was outside the scope of their official duties thereby barring them from shifting the burden to the school district. I don’t know if my daughter would want to wear a 6-inch button saying “Fuck Your Zero Tolerance” to school everyday, though.
Comment by The Lost Dog (El Pero Perdido) on 10/21 @ 8:24 pm #
Yeesh!
“From a practical perspective a school issuing pre-teen girls the pill is absolutely insane. There are grown women who are unable to use it for medical reasons. Add to that introducing to a girl at that stage of development something that is designed to alter the user’s body chemistry. For people that are so seemingly concerned about potential liability to approve such a policy boggles the mind.”
Hardy har!
And my kid can be suspended for bringing an aspirin to school…Un-flinking-believesble!
Comment by mojo on 10/21 @ 8:53 pm #
Does the fact that Progestrin is a synthetic hormone count at all?
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/21 @ 9:03 pm #
Dog – Or you need parental consent to get an aspirin from the school nurse. Birth control or abortion – no problemo.
Comment by Big Dan on 10/22 @ 5:23 am #
This is your Weapon,
And this is your Gun.
One is for shooting,
The other for fun.
Comment by Big Bang (pumping you up.) on 10/22 @ 5:36 am #
- Yeh. Same thing I was thinking, So now teh SicProggs have settled on calling them guns huh.
- Hey look at the bright side. Now the pedophiles among the teachers won’t have to worry about having any little bastards to support. See, a win-win for everybody. Gawd how I loathe the fucking Left.
Comment by Big Bang (pumping you up.) on 10/22 @ 5:38 am #
- SicProggs ™ – PW
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 12:22 pm #
Why don’t they hand out parents to these children, instead of pills? That seems to be the central problem. Barring that, it seems to me that at a certain age, the best possible deterrent for sexual activity is to let a couple girls get pregnant and have a school assembly to explain how it happened and how they’re going to spend the next eighteen years of their lives.
But abstinence education? Come on. If that’s the cutting edge of right-wing baby-prevention technology, said Right deserves all the depravity “the fucking Left” has to dish out. That’s up there with Intelligent Design on the list of embarrassingly inadequate educational solutions.
Comment by maggie katzen on 10/22 @ 12:33 pm #
I think daleyrocks brings up a good point about STI’s though. the pill ain’t gonna cover that. are they then going to start handing out antibiotics and other drugs?
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/22 @ 12:39 pm #
Travel Advisory – Bad Clams In California.
Comment by BJTexs on 10/22 @ 12:47 pm #
Gabriel:
How about “all of the above” short of empowering kids to have sex? How about parent involvement, shaming at the assembly, education of the ways and the consequences of pregancy, glorious color photos of STD’s and STI’s and abstinence education as the only 100% effective way to insure that “non of the above” actually happens!
Or we can just declare defeat over our own progeny and set up a wet bar for condoms, birth control and an STD clinic. We need to make it a big deal again when very underage kids have sex.
Yup I’m talking guilt and shame, the whole nine yards. Call me puritan and patriarchal but don’t call me late for assembly.
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 12:49 pm #
Pretty soon the kids will show up to middle school with their pencils, bookbags, bright cheery faces, and big bottles of water to help swallow the handful of pills the school system is dispensing along with their locker assignments and homerooms.
Luckily that situation will be cut mercifully short by the resultant epidemic of antibiotic-resistant staph infections and ovarian cancers. Wheat from the chaff, you know.
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/22 @ 12:58 pm #
Gabriel – Do you have children?
Comment by BJTexs on 10/22 @ 12:59 pm #
What I am about to say is provocative and possibly unfair but … this is a shining example of why government run health care scares the crap out of me. Lack. Of. Common. Sense.
There, I said it. LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF WAR!!!
Gabriel, it seems to me that if you and I and maggie and Darleen and BB and daley put our heads together we’d come up with a way more viable and common sense plan, despite our philisophical differences. Why must we deal with the crushing irony that school systems are often so stupid?
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 1:00 pm #
I’m half with you. Abstinence is the only 100% effective way to make sure none of that ever happens. Abstinence education is the only 100% effective way to make sure that all the money thrown at the problem is ENTIRELY wasted, because if you just set the whole pile of cash on fire, some could get caught in the updraft and spared from the flames.
Comment by daleyrocks on 10/22 @ 1:07 pm #
Gabriel – No one has suggested abstinence only. The way kids think, if you make birth control available, I’m of the opinion that they will use it and more will become sexually active than would have had the school not provided the option. Word of mouth works that way. Some who weren’t even thinking about it may be encouraged or pushed into it by peer pressure by lowering the risk by the free birth control.
That’s my opinion and I don’t think it’s a behavior area a school openly encourage at earlier ages with programs such as this. The kids aren’t mature enough to handle it emotionally.
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 1:29 pm #
I agree with you daley. I think that the schools shouldn’t be meddling with kids’ lives quite so deeply at all, but it’s also difficult to work at a school and see these kids every day who are giving out handjobs on the bus and whose parents are AWOL and not do anything about it, because their futures are pretty well predictable.
I would guess there’s a happy medium to be reached, some combination of basic health-class sex ed and contraceptive info (maybe a google-map showing the nearest Planned Parenthood office), but they all seem to have their drawbacks, because that’s just the kind of problem it is.
Or, and here’s the silver bullet, you make vasectomies part of public-school admittance, and you can get them untied for free only if you take and pass a class on the demands and responsibilities of child-rearing. Sure, some will heal on their own, but for the most part you’ll get the results you want. STDs will still be a problem, but to deal with that I’ll refer you to my other fabulous social program involving mandatory testing and the issuance of “DANGER: HERPES!” facial tattooing. It will be a brave new world indeed, when I am king.
Comment by Darleen on 10/22 @ 2:18 pm #
You know Gabriel, James Woolcott not only does the “watch me as I demonstrate what unsufferable rubes you all are” better, but he does it with pinky fully extended AND he has cats.
Do you have cats?
This isn’t about the perfect plan to stop all sexual contact of middle schoolers…. it IS about the insanity of public school political agendas that faced with such a problem…just declare it a NON problem and hand out drugs so the sex can be “safe” (safe for whom never seems to cross the liberal mind)
This is “red ribbon” week in schools in my area. What stupid people to believe that educating kids that drugs are dangerous…shouldn’t they just set up a lounge where sterile needles, organically grown pot, and a few bottles of a nice CA chardonny are served?
Oh…but no tobacco!
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 3:10 pm #
I don’t have cats. I’m also not doing the Woolcott schtick. I will cop to pinky-finger extension, but that’s just to reach the right side of the keyboard. I don’t think this is about making sex safe for middle-schoolers, I would guess that it’s a move driven more by desperation that political ideology, as the children of children have more children, and they end up in the schools. It’s a last-ditch attempt to nip that problem in the bud, in hopes of turning the tide against a whole raft of related social ills that arise when kids grow up essentially wild and unsupervised.
The fact that it is imperfect and probably ill-advised is a separate issue. The argument for it is the seat-belt analogy, i.e. that seat-belts and airbags don’t encourage aggressive driving, the argument against it is that providing birth-control is a tacit endorsement of sexual congress. There is a degree of truth in both, HOWEVER, the school system is not in the business of raising children, just educating them, for reasons of both charter and resource scarcity, and therefore, when it encounters problems derived from ineffective child-rearing, tends to address symptoms, since addressing root causes is a much more complicated task that is outside their bailiwick.
Many a teacher would like to see fewer hormones in the milk, and less sugar in the school lunches, and more parent involvement, but their ability to regulate these things is not so great. After they have taught three generations of one family in twenty-five years, the idea of passing out birth-control to middle-schoolers doesn’t seem so monstrous, just practical. The proper response to this school in Maine is “if things are so bad that this course of action seemed reasonable, greater efforts are needed to remediate the degradation of the social fabric in that community.” Using it as a cudgel in the pursuit of the great and holy cause of Left-Right political bickering is a little crass.
And as for the “say no to drugs” crowd, I tuned them out when they told me that pot and ecstasy were equally dangerous, an anecdote that contains a lesson for anyone interested in preventive education for kids. It didn’t drive me to drug-use, but it did torch the credibility of those who had made it their mission to keep me sober.
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/22 @ 3:13 pm #
more by desperation THAN political ideology
Comment by Darleen on 10/22 @ 4:21 pm #
Geez, Gabe, haven’t been in the trenches of elementary/jr high/sr high from a parent’s POV have you?
There are some good and caring teachers, but even they rise up in horror when parents have the audacity to want their views respected. After all, the teachers are the professionals. They got that certificate on the wall and everything.
Teachers would just like pet parents… people that show up to herd the kids, clean the room and write checks…no conversation please.
This is nothing new, just more of the SOS that sent me home day after day of volunteering uncounted hours at my kids’ numerous schools wanting to bang my head on the walls.
And funny you should mention sugar
Believe me…it is agenda.
Comment by dicentra on 10/22 @ 6:03 pm #
Have cats. No kids. Abstinent, too.
The abstinence-only education doesn’t work because the only people in society who actually think it’s a good idea are the abstinence-only teachers and a few parents. The larger culture mocks the very concept, and if you make it to college as a virgin, you might as well finish the job and wear plaid dork-pants and a propeller beanie to class every day.
The public, pop-culture concept of human sexuality is as sophisticated as what you’d find in a high-school boys’ locker room. Nobody is giving kids a viable, believable, positive reason to wait. Not many kids can stand the humiliation of being The Only Kid In Class Who Hasn’t.
Those who say “they’ll do it anyway” and pass out contraception really don’t, in their heart of hearts, think that there’s anything wrong with teen sex. Smoking, on the other hand? Not Recycling? Watch the Wrath Of God descend when those subjects come up.
Imagine if people looked at the problem of bullying and said, “well, they’ll do it anyway” and passed out first aid kits on the one hand and brickbats on the other, all the better to make sure it’s done thoroughly.
No kid is going to listen to adults say “wait” when they can’t imagine why they should. There’s not a show on TV or in the movies that models chaste behavior without ridiculing it.
Comment by happyfeet on 10/22 @ 6:24 pm #
Well, what I think is you get laid but then in high school at least you have to sort of manage your resume so you look like you have standards. That’s a small town thing I guess, but it’s the sort of thing that can still work reasonably well, so what’s so important is that we teach kids to name and shame the sluts and spread STD rumours and stuff about them. Girls sort of get the brunt of this, but “he has herpes” can be pretty devastating, and the system really does work.
Comment by Big Bang (pumping you up.) on 10/22 @ 6:36 pm #
- Fry you’re an ass. A Temporizing ass. Your comments are the same ole same ole “Hands in the air, oh what the hell” attitude thats been spewed by the post-VietNam Left since its inception. “If it feels good do it”. Wasn’t that the rallying cry of the “Flower power” generation. Now 3 decades later you see the results. More of the same? Not with My kids you don’t.
- Go have a few kids and raise them, and then just maybe I’ll take a damn thing you have to say on the subject seriously. Until then I’m not sure I’d even trust you with washing cars.
- Not sure but you probably qualify as a -
PARENTHAWK!!!!111!1one!!!111
Comment by Big Bang (pumping you up.) on 10/22 @ 7:01 pm #
Parenthawk ™ – PW
Comment by andy on 10/22 @ 9:30 pm #
“Why don’t they bring in hand mirrors and teach the little girls masturbation techniques and that they don’t need boys if they don’t want them. Get them indoctrinated into the whole feminist agenda before they hit puberty”
Masturbation. the Feminist agenda. I’m luvin it.
Comment by Pablo on 10/22 @ 9:56 pm #
OK, now let’s talk root causes. Do you see any here?
Comment by Gabriel Fry on 10/24 @ 3:22 pm #
I kind of thought I might be Parenthawked. Bastard. There’s nothing “hands in the air” about it, but, um, I’m taking a more nuanced… damn. I’m saying that it’s being incompetently… damn. I just think that there are better ways to address the problem than… shit.
Wanna talk about Iraq?
Darleen, my experience is limited to being the kid that my mom fought the school system over (I went out for ice cream during the sex-ed classes in fourth grade) and volunteering at a middle school/going drinking with the teachers (not in fourth grade). So I’m drawing from those experiences, and while they aren’t quite the same as having a kid, they’re not without value.
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