Posted on 01/06/2009 8:54:21 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion
Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.
"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.
In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."
Here's the rub: It just isn't true.
In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Just a routine case of the exposure of one more journalistic propaganda scam . . .
< snip >
“ Until now,” wrote Joseph Comte de Maistre ( 1753- 1821), who for 15 years was a Freemason, “ nations were killed by conquest, that is by invasion: But here an important question arises; can a nation not die on its own soil, without resettlement or invasion, by allowing the flies of decomposition to corrupt to the very core those original and constituent principles which make it what it is.”
What was the Frankfurt School? Well, in the days following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was believed that workers’ revolution would sweep into Europe and, eventually, into the United States. But it did not do so. Toward the end of 1922 the Communist International (Comintern) began to consider what were the reasons. On Lenin’s initiative a meeting was organized at the Marx- Engels Institute in Moscow. Its aim was to clarify the concept of, and give concrete effect to, a Marxist cultural revolution.
Amongst those present were Georg Lukacs (a Hungarian aristocrat, son of a banker, who had become a Communist during the First World War; a good Marxist theoretician he developed the idea of “ Revolution and Eros” — sexual instinct used as an instrument of destruction) and Willi Munzenberg ( whose proposed solution was to “organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat”).
“It was,” said Ralph de Toledano ( 1916- 2007) the conservative author and cofounder of the National Review, a meeting “perhaps more harmful to Western civilization than the Bolshevik Revolution itself.”
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2144382/posts
It is our job as conservatives and libertarians (whoever you are) to get out there, not just on FR, to spread the word and truth that the liberal, communist, immoral media is spewing hatred and decadence.
I can see how a certain number of pledges go by the boards at the first actual opportunity, but there ARE young people who aren’t alley cats as well.
Actually, this article misses the most egregious error made by this “survey” of an old study.
The author of the survey felt it wasn’t correct to compare kids who take a “virginity pledge” directly against kids who didn’t, since there could be many other factors that would effect their choice regarding pre-marital sex.
The original study simply compared “pledge” vs “non-pledge”, and found that the pledge group was much less sexually active, and much less risky, than the non-pledge group.
So what this survey author did was to “characterize” the personalities of those who would take a pledge. And she decided they must be religious conservatives.
Having done so, she then compared the pledge group against the group of “religious conservative children”.
And what she “found” was that the pledge group had sex just as often as the religious conservatives, and worse (she says) the pledge group engaged in more risky behavior than the religious conservatives, having unprotected sex.
The referenced article from the WSJ points out the obvious error, which is that the headlines generated suggest the pledge kids are worse off, when in fact they are much better off than the norm. The WSJ article concludes that it isn’t the pledge, but the characteristics of those would take such a pledge, that is important.
But thee bigger flaw in the survey is the PRESUMPTION that the pledge-takers were in fact otherwise indistinguishable from religious conservative non-pledge-takers.
But they aren’t, both “obviously” and also “logically”. First, “obviously” there is some difference between the two groups, since the pledge group felt compelled to take a pledge and the “religious conservative” comparative group did not. Why would an individual take a pledge? The author treats the pledge as an independent variable — here were some religious kids, and some were “given the pledge” while others were not.
But taking the pledge is not just an act of random opportunity, but it is a CHOICE. Who would choose to take a pledge? Someone who feels pressured to have sex, but wants to keep their religious vows. If you aren’t feeling like having sex, you’d really have no reason to take a pledge.
So the group of kids who take a pledge are likely those who were otherwise MORE LIKELY to have sex, and the fact that they have no more sex than those who didn’t take a pledge is actually a sign the pledge works.
But worse, there is another group of kids who take the pledge — kids who have already had sex, and now want to pledge not to do so again in order to “gain back their virginity”.
And this second group is NOT confined to religious conservative children, but also includes kids who got pregnant and now know better, or kids who realised the emptiness of sexual relationships and want something to help them, like having an AA partner.
So this SECOND group is a group of children who were actively engaging in sex, who now want to stop. Comparing THIS group to a group of religious conservatives who never had sex, have no interest in sex, and therefore have no interest in taking a pledge is not only flawed, but it is absurd.
i’m guessing that if you compared this 2nd group of pledge-takers to active sex kids who DON’T take a pledge, you would find that the pledge-takers have less sex.
However, you might find they are more likely to have unprotected sex. Because in addition to taking a pledge, the other way to stop a previous sex behavior is to remove the temptations, one of which would be the condoms and birth control. The risk of pregnancy or disease, the children would decide, might help them resist temptation.
Compare this to drinkers. A non-drinker will never join AA, will never take the AA pledge, will never have an AA sponsor. They don’t need one, and any comparison of the efficacy of AA where you compared the AA people to this group of non-drinkers would be absurd.
But among drinkers, you also won’t find too many who join AA unless they decided they really needed to quit drinking for some reason. Most drinkers who decide to quit will just do so, and only join AA if they have TROUBLE QUITTING.
So comparing two people who want to quit, one who joins AA and one who does not, you might find that the one who joins AA is just as likely to drink as the one who does not, and if they do drink are more likely to do so with hidden cheap booze rather than in a social setting (the equivalant of “unsafe sex”).
Does this mean AA is not any good? No, it means that the people who join AA are the high-risk group.
Of course, this “survey” is based on data from the 1990s. How did this woman figure out enough characteristics of the study group to do here sub-group analysis? She must have had some general questionaire data. She wouldn’t have had the details she would need to break the respondents up the way I have suggested.
And since this woman was an active proponent of a “new way” of teaching sex education that would not include Abstinence, her choice of how to divide the group, leading to exactly the results she wanted, is not just suspect, it should be dismissed.
But since the media is on her side, they parrot her false conclusions as if they are fact, just as last year they parroted the Democratic Party “study” that claimed abstinence education is a waste of money.
In general members of the media have the following premises in common : Sedition, treason, homosexual sodomy, pornography,prostitution, narcotics use, obtaining taxpayer funds and Democrats in office. The aforementioned are expressed in a histrionic, hysterical, decadent and degenerate fashion.
BTTT
The Pueblo smoking ban study also has an unreported flaw, it makes its case using number of hospitalizations for heart attacks rather than heart attack presence where many die in transport and need not be hospitalized.
Worse, the swings month to month are huge before and after the ban and appear to be seasonal; beyond that, the 18 month period before the ban fell in total number by almost 21% making the overall drop for the 36 months 41% suspect as to its start.
Figures don’t lie but liars figure.
Have you read the study from Pueblo I mentioned in my #9?
Compare this to drinkers. A non-drinker will never join AA, will never take the AA pledge, will never have an AA sponsor. They don’t need one, and any comparison of the efficacy of AA where you compared the AA people to this group of non-drinkers would be absurd.
But among drinkers, you also won’t find too many who join AA unless they decided they really needed to quit drinking for some reason. Most drinkers who decide to quit will just do so, and only join AA if they have TROUBLE QUITTING.
So comparing two people who want to quit, one who joins AA and one who does not, you might find that the one who joins AA is just as likely to drink as the one who does not, and if they do drink are more likely to do so with hidden cheap booze rather than in a social setting (the equivalant of “unsafe sex”).
Excellent point. Excellent.
Yes, of course...and many News stations, including a more reputable one I listen to, also took the bait.
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