Pre-marital sex - yes
Safe sex and respect for human life - no (IMHO)
Who should be checking and balancing the first two of those things?
When murders can get out of prison sooner than people convicted of tax evasion, I would say we are definitely showing a lack of respect for human life. When people push to keep partial birth abortion legal, or having *invented it in the first place*, I’d say we are devaluing human life.
As to safe sex, I’d say the media and society gives mixed signals on that issue.
As for pre-marital sex, it is difficult to deny that the majority of “unwanted” pregnancies occur outside of marriage. Not all by any means, but a majority. Same with STD’s. In the past, there were really just 2 common STD’s, the other didn’t even exist yet. Due to mutation and proliferation of these two diseases, we gained several new and nasty ones. And this started during the illustrious ‘60s during the “Sexual Revolution” and many of the taboos against pre-marital sex fell by the wayside.
This graph shows the hard spike in Gonorrhea rates from ‘65-’75. My guess is the smaller spike occurred near ‘45 due to the war and soldiers contracting it while on leave and bringing it back to the States. But don’t quote me on that. The significant drop then occurs when safe sex started catching on and people became more educated. However, we are still left with the lingering effects of the 60’s and 70’s in the form of new, hardier, STDs. Therein lies the danger of pre-marital sex and the media’s love affair with it (no pun intended.)
As to who should be checking and balancing? People themselves. Again, we as a society have removed too many morals that have since turned out to be grounded in not just tradition, but expediency for society as a whole.
