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November 5 2007
My father’s dart
board hangs in the garage unused. A great rainy day game, years ago
we could happily pass hours waiting for the sky to clear. A steak on
the grill under the eaves, a football game on a television to the
side, and a dart game for the commercials…good memories of good
times.
Like all things
from the past, it is amazing to see what modern technology has done
with a simple game we once played on a 14-inch paper target with
plastic red and yellow darts. The Hot Seller at
www.dartboards.com boasts 5 bright LED lights and comes with both soft
tip and steel tip darts. With 210 variations of 37 games, you will
never lack for a partner. The Halex CricketView Dart Board Package
features Cybermatch, letting you play against the computer.
Modern
technology has done a lot to update the game of darts. But one thing
hasn’t changed. At $219.99, complete with computer partners and LED
lights, the Halex Dart Board still has the familiar scoring system
around the edge funneling in to a small precious bull’s eye at the
center.
Bull’s Eye!
This exclamation first evidenced itself in print in 1825, being used
to describe much more than the center of a target. Broadly speaking,
“a shot that hits the bull’s eye” is, according to Webster’s,
“something that precisely attains a desired end.” You succeeded
because you were focused on “something central or crucial.”
Life is like a
good game of darts. You can set out, throwing darts all day, all
week, all year long, and here and there, you will certainly rack up a
fair number of points. But if you want to play the game to win, life
works much better when you are aiming for the bull’s eye.
No wonder
today’s kids are having such a rough go at the game of life. Raised
in the modern age of relativism, the bull’s eye has been painted off
the board, leaving a game with no focus, with nothing “central or
crucial.”
A report
appearing in the Journal of Adolescent Health sheds light on a
tragic example of life without a bull’s eye. The Pacific Institute
for Research and Evaluation studied in detail how California teens
ages 12 to 16 interpret abstinence and sexual activity. Their results
will make your eyes pop.
According to the
study, 12 percent of the children believed they were abstinent if
engaging in sexual (vaginal) intercourse. For 14 percent of the
youth, anal sex was considered abstaining. More than 44 percent
considered genital touching an abstinent behavior, and 33 percent
believed oral sex qualified as abstinence.
These teens have
done a great job of learning what they have been taught. On the
popular advice column posted by Columbia University, a student asks
Alice, “I have a question from my college sexuality class: In what
behaviors can one participate and still be sexually abstinent?"
Alice responds,
“To some, abstinence is not having any type of sexual experience. To
others, it means not having oral, anal, or vaginal sex. Some define
abstinence specifically as not allowing penetration or not having
vaginal or anal intercourse, but believe that oral sex is acceptable
for them to give or get.”
To clarify,
Alice offers up concrete examples. She advises this student that
“with a partner” she can try “window shopping”…or “taking a shower.”
Tomorrow the student and her “partner” might enjoy “picnicking in the
park”…or they might “cuddle, caress, or stroke each other with
fingers, lips, and tongues, with or without clothes on.” Either
this…or that…it’s all abstinence.
And just to make
sure there is no confusion, Alice wraps up her 500-word description of
sexual abstinence with this guiding light, “It's important to think
about what abstinence means to you, and then to live by
that belief (until you choose to change your mind, rather than
changing it in the heat of the moment). [underlining added]
Ask Alice
at Columbia University is not an aberration. She is representative of
comprehensive sex education programs.
“In California,”
explains Valerie Huber, Executive Director of the National Abstinence
Education Association (NAEA), “96 percent of schools teach
comprehensive sex education, and according to a recent report in the
California Journal of Health Promotion, there has been 1.1
million new STD cases reported in Californians ages 15 to 24. A
careful review of the most popular comprehensive sex education
curricula reveals that it leaves definitions for abstinence up to the
discretion of the individual student. It is not surprising that teens
loosely define the term and end up acquiring an STD as a result.”
Without a bull’s
eye to define sexual abstinence, the results of the study by the
Pacific Institute are completely understandable. No bull’s eye. No
need to aim.
The stake in a
game of horseshoes, home runs, uprights or darts is points, and it is
senseless to play the game without a target to aim for.
The stake in the
game of life is…life. Why be surprised at the tragic results of the
game of life if we hand our children a target without a bull’s eye?
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September 4, 2006
Fear-Based Sex Education
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