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A few weeks ago, the governor of Tennessee, the great and terrifying and retrograde and

devolving state of Tennessee signed a bill until law a new bill addressing the abstinence

education problem in Tennessee. The problem, of course,

with absence education is that Tennessee has it at all. Studies show that it doesn't work,

kids who've been subjected to abstinence-only sex ed do delay the onset of sexual activity

by about six months, not until marriage, by about six months. And when they do become sexually active, they're less likely to use condoms, less likely to use any form of birth control, and more likely to get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted infection.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we have gotten for our almost $2 billion that we've sunk down the abstinence education rattle.

But Tennessee passed a new law aimed at curbing sexual activity among young people,

beefing up their abstinence only, sex ed, that bans any teaching, not just teaching,

any acknowledgement of, or any approval of by authority figures,

by teachers, by sex educators of what they're calling gateway sexual activity, which is defined

to include things like handholding, thigh touching. It's actually not defined under the law.

People are now having to figure out what exactly a gateway sexual activity might be because if you teach it or if you approve of it, you can be in violation of this law and be fined $500 or more.

Hilariously, there's a story at the Tennessean about this.

Opponents argued the law contains murky definitions, as I've just detailed, that make it difficult for teachers to discuss subjects, frankly.

Proponents of the law, however, said the measure was needed to clarify the meaning of abstinence.

This is something they do need to clarify.

This has come up a lot.

It's come up in Savage Love a few years ago because you had all this abstinence-only sex education, which is designed by right-wing conservative religious nutcase bigots and doesn't address the sex people are actually having or the sexualities of children who are actually sitting in front of you in the classroom. But the sex that these sex-negative psychopaths wish that everyone was having.

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