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From today's Portland Press Herald:

— The best summation of the Portland School Committee's 7-2 vote to approve offering birth control to King Middle School students as young as 11 came from one of the commentators on this newspaper's Web site.

It's a real distinction, said "PortlandMike," (no, not me) for the city's school board to become a national disgrace twice in the same year.

But it has achieved that difficult feat, once by being incompetent at staying within its budget and now for facilitating dangerous actions by kids.

This gargantuan bit of overreach is based on a sad truth -- some children, even ones as young as 11 (or even younger), are engaging in sexual activity.

But where exactly is it written in the Liberal Handbook that the way to handle a tragic situation is to make it worse by 1) encouraging it through implicit approval by offering (wholly inadequate) tools to conduct "safer sex" and 2) telling those who see the utter unwisdom of this course of action that they are the ones who don't understand the situation because "kids will always have sex"?

If you want kids to refrain from smoking, even though some kids will smoke no matter what you do or say, you don't give them filter cigarettes because they're safer than the unfiltered kind. Instead, you teach them about the dangers of smoking and make it illegal to sell them tobacco.

If you want kids to keep from drinking, even though some of them inevitably will, you don't give out hangover remedies and referrals to Alcoholics Anonymous. You teach them about the dangers of drinking and ban selling them booze.

And if you want kids not to do drugs, even if some of them cannot be kept from putting their lives at risk, you don't give them clean needles and purer forms of cocaine. You . .. well, you get the picture.

But when it comes to sex, our highly credentialed educational professionals go nutso.

First they deny that there are any parallels, by claiming that warning kids away from risky behavior is effective in every other circumstance except sex.

Then they say that keeping girls from getting pregnant is more important than any other moral or physical concern.

Rates of middle-school sexual activity in Maine are dropping (from 23 percent to 13 percent since 1997, according to one study), with 17 pregnancies reported in that age group in Portland in the past four years.

Still, suddenly it has become necessary to "prevent pregnancies" in the 11- to 15-year-old demographic by offering "a full range of contraceptives" at the King health clinic for kids who have their parents' permission to get medical aid there.

True, such devices, if used correctly, may keep a girl from becoming pregnant (though the idea of two youngsters mastering the art of condom use in the throes of passion seems somewhat unlikely). But none of them except condoms (and those imperfectly) offer any protection at all against sexually transmitted diseases.

So, parents who give their kids permission to get birth control are giving them permission to contract a number of diseases that could render them sterile, give them cancer or remain a contagious, incurable affliction for as long as they live. "Safer sex," indeed.

Then there's the whole parental responsibility thing. Despite the Portland policy requiring parental approval, our state's lawmakers, in their less-than-infinite wisdom, have already said that our kids can get birth control from other sources -- or, for that matter, have an abortion -- without ever consulting their parents.

In order to protect the very few who might suffer from abuse, they override the rights of the vast majority of ordinary, loving moms and dads who are responsible before God for their children's upbringing.

There's proof that parental involvement works. A study to be published in January in the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization says that state parental involvement laws are effective in reducing...