'You are married to the Lord and your daddy is your boyfriend':

[Swede Atlanta]

120. I think I read some statistics on this a year or so ago....

and the results are not what Daddy is expecting. If I recall correctly the % of "purity" girls that ended up having premarital sex was actually higher than their peers and the % of premarital pregnancies was on par with their peers.

Telling a young man not to masturbate or have sex or tell a girl not to give into a boyfriend when these young people are raging with hormones is akin to trying to douse an oil well blowout with a kitchen extinguisher.

Young people have always, and will always, have sex. They will masturbate.

The best thing parents can do is to provide them with education so that if they decide to have sex they have protected sex not only to avoid pregnancy but avoid the transmission of STDs.

Parents can always encourage chastity and if that is part of their faith tradition I am not going to criticize it. But having young girls make these pledges which pit their religious faith (or indoctrination) against their biological "natural" desires is very cruel.

Three of my aunts/uncles who I presented themselves as "holier than thou" when I was a child I later learned had a bun in the oven before their wedding. Once I learned that I called them on the carpet when they tried to flaunt their religious piety.