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June 20, 2005
As big as it can
be, a building size mural on our baseball stadium features four young
kids suited up for a game. It preaches success to every driver and
the youngsters riding with them. Get Active, Stay Tobacco Free.
MADD, Mothers
Against Drunk Driving founded a campaign in the memory of a mother’s
young teen killed by a drunk driver. Schools post crumbled cars in
the middle of high school campuses. Youth clubs and police visits to
schools carry one unshakable message to students. Don’t drink and
drive.
Drugs? Teens
are told in no uncertain terms. Don’t do them. Radio commercials not
only preach to young people, they preach to adults. Talk to your
kids, ask your kids where they are going, accept nothing less than
success. What if a parent did drugs in their past? The radio
exhorts parents to separate past failures from teaching success.
To help teens get over their problems, you have to get over yours.
Tobacco, drunk
driving, drugs…we have no problem preaching success. And then, of
course, there is sex.
Medical
realities have created the necessity to lead children to healthy
sexual choices…abstaining from sex until marriage. We are in the
midst of an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, STDs. One in
five people over the age of twelve…the age of twelve…has genital
herpes, a lifelong incurable disease.
Statistical
proof has been offered demonstrating we can lead children to
successful lives where they abstain from sex. And students are
showing that even when they have had sex, given truth and
encouragement, they can redefine their lives with sexual abstinence.
During the
course of ten years with abstinence funding and growing educational
programs, we have seen teen pregnancy rates decline. This should be
good news and inspire us to be more determined in our efforts and more
clear in our message…leading teens to success. It should make
television producers more responsible for showing the consequences of
teen sex and for leading the effort to show sexual promiscuity as
irresponsible behavior rather than the great American pastime.
Instead, PBS is
spending American taxpayer dollars to preach failure. It has ignored
the hundreds of teens in the Louisiana’s Governor’s Program for
Abstinence. Instead, looking for a preacher for failure, it has chosen
one teen in Texas who actively opposes the abstinence curriculum in
her school.
Shelby
is a Christian teenager in Lubbock, Texas. At age 13, she pledged
abstinence until marriage. But at the ripe old age of 13, Shelby
doesn’t believe in abstinence programs. She is the perfect person to
preach failure to
America.
Abstinence…it’s
the healthy choice. It is a message that is working, against all
odds, against the rampant sexual filth promoted by television and
movies, encouraging teens to make the healthy choice.
Just imagine
what teens could do if PBS producers, parents, educators, movie
actors, friends, family, and legislators actually believed they could
succeed. Just imagine what teens would believe about sex if they
could hear adults in leadership roles mentor and encourage them to
succeed. Just imagine for one minute that there existed a PBS
producer who believed that teens deserved the truth about premarital
sex and used all their resources to encourage them to abstain from
sex.
Preaching
failure…letting a 13-year-old student speak for them…producers are
taking the easy way out. Success, they are teaching, is not for
everyone. It may work for
Shelby,
but it won’t work for her schoolmates.
Focusing on
failure…letting a 13-year-old student direct their cameras…producers
are pointing out how easy it is to fail. And if failure is
inevitable, then why bother exhorting students to succeed.
If students have
trouble succeeding in maintaining sexual abstinence, we have no
further to look than to the mentors who lead the way. Why would teens
have any chance for success if we found our message on failure?
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