This week's poll from the Lester & Charlie Institute of Forward Thinking!
There's been oodles of talk lately about women in America!
Aren't they better off (as some conservatives suggest) seeking a rich husband than a good job? Do they deserve equal pay? Or are they more like, say, NFL cheerleaders -- which the U.S. Department of Labor this week called nothing more than "amusement" -- and not even worth minimum wage?
If you're like us, you may have found yourself reading the news and checking your calendar to see if you accidentally woke up in the wrong century. All of that is bad enough -- but the story that really made us sit up and drop our vaginal probes this week was the one about what they're teaching girls in Mississippi about sex.
Not every kid in Mississippi gets Sex Ed in school -- despite it being required and despite the fact that 76 percent of Mississippi high-school kids will have sex before graduating.
But perhaps the kids who do learn something about sex aren't much better off -- seeing as how condom demonstrations are illegal, and how they're only allowed to hear about the value of abstinence, and how a "monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the only appropriate setting for sexual intercourse." Oh, and that homosexuality is illegal. And, perhaps best of all, how a girl who has sex is no better than a used piece of chocolate.
In what's being called "purity preservation exercises" (also known as slut-shaming), teachers in Mississippi have been handing unwrapped Peppermint Patties to girls for them to pass around the room -- all the better to show how dirty it becomes when it gets too "used." (Really!)
We've wondered before if Red States like Louisiana and Texas -- places that teach their kids things like "bible-based math" and how liberals threaten global prosperity -- deal with their under-educated graduates by shipping them all off to be teachers in Mississippi. Now we wonder if we were being unfair. Some of these Mississippi teachers sound like they got no education whatsoever, not even a half-baked Texas or Louisiana one.
Mississippi parents who support Sex Ed in schools have the sadly laughable hope that, by the time the law requiring it in Mississippi schools expires in 2016, declining teenage birth rates will have proved it to be a successful program. Not likely, given what these kids are learning while passing around melting chocolate.
But then we got to wondering: So much of this story has been about what they're teaching the girls. No one seems to have asked what they're teaching the boys. Mississippi law requires boys and girls to learn Sex Ed in separate classrooms. If the girls are getting nothing but useless information about sex, what in the world are the boys learning? What do YOU think?
"We know what they're teaching the girls in Mississippi. What are they teaching the boys?"
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