Via KOS…A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers?   Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior…

Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That’s how the species survives. Maybe you don’t want them to have sex and maybe they even promise they won’t, but biology is more powerful than parents or governments.

Or even…religious dogmas.  Like those that insist evolution is nonsense because it contradicts the biblical story of creation…

A study published in the journal Pediatrics followed 289 teenagers who said in 1996 they took a virginity pledge and compared them with 645 non-pledgers, taking into account religious beliefs and attitudes to sex and birth control. This was done because previous studies didn’t factor in the possibility that teens who pledge may be quite different characteristics that affect sexual behavior than those who don’t. So this was an attempt to compare "like with like," the main difference being that one group had promised not to have sex while the other didn’t. "Virginity pledges" are a prominent feature of the Bush administration’s abstinence only sex education programs that didn’t teach contraceptive practices.

Five years after taking the pledge:

• 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge
• Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors
• Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex (Jennifer Warner, WebMD News)

There was one significant difference between the pledge and non-pledge group, however. They were less likely to use condoms or any form of birth control when they did have sex.

You can’t blame them. No one told them how.

Here’s the thing you need to notice about this: Eighty-two percent of them denied ever having taken the pledge.  Not that they broke the pledge and had sex anyway, but that they denied they’d made it.  Eighty.  Two.  Percent.

This is where fundamentalism finds its dead end.  You can accept that the bible is literally true or you can accept the natural world as it really is but you can’t accept them both.  Fundamentalism won’t have it.  The simple, stark, finger of God writing it on the wall truth is this: fundamentalism corrupts its followers.  It has to.  When confronted by a fact, the honest thing to do, the moral thing, is knowledge it.  But fundamentalism demands that you deny any fact that contradicts its own truths.  What it instills in a person isn’t either a love or fear of god, but a casual acceptance of deception, first as a religious duty, then as a necessary part of every day life.  See it in Alan Bonsell testifying under oath that he did not know where the money had been raised to donate sixty copies of Of Pandas and People to his school’s library.  See it in the Proposition 8 advertisements that claimed same sex marriage would result in the forcing of churches to marry homosexuals.  See it in the eighty-two percent of teenagers in that study who denied they’d ever taken a virginity pledge.  Their religion didn’t change their sexual behavior.  It didn’t make them more moral.  It made them less likely to use condoms, more likely to catch and spread VD, more likely to get each other pregnant, and more willing to lie.  What their religion did for them in short, was take away their brakes.