Opinions are fine in news stories. Untruths do not belong.
There's an article on today's online NYT called Abstinence Education Faces Uncertain Future. It's a fairly innocuous article about some Texans who are upset because abstinence education is losing favor simply because it doesn't work. Fine. If people want to argue that we should keep spending money on programs that have been shown to be completely ineffective, they're free to do that. But in doing so, they really should start an opinion with "I think," instead of stating it as fact, and journalists should really be able to tell the difference.
The article quotes one Eric Love (Awesome name for a virgin, eh?), director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, as saying, "You have to look at why sex was created... [it] was created to bond two people together." There are two problems with this. First, sex was not created. There's no debate here -- no intelligent one, at least. It evolved, just like everything else in biology, including you and me. Second, it didn't evolve to bond two people together. It evolved because natural selection favors genetic diversity. We aren't the only animals that have sex, you know. I wonder if Mr. Love thinks sex was created to bind together sea turtles and tapeworms, too. If it was, it doesn't work very well. The percentage of monogamous species in the sexual world is extremely low. What are all those adulterous animals doing making a mockery of our sacred rite?
The truth is, we humans have made a shameful mockery of the wonder of sex. It is one of the most amazing evolutionary developments in the history of life. If not for sex, we'd still be stuck in the primordial soup stage. But a few thousand years ago, we started telling each other ghost stories, and now we, particularly we Americans, have the mental and emotional sexual maturity of schoolchildren. Sex is not bad. It's not offensive to any uptight sky-gods. And your future spouse will not love you more if you "save it." So, please, grow up, people.
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