Give'em Cigarettes too!

Picked up knowledge on this story from Bob Dunning's Across The Nation on SiriusXM's The Catholic Channel yesterday. Apparently elementary school students in Massachusetts will have access to condoms. According to WHDH-TV in Boston,

Under the new policy at Veteran's Memorial Elementary School, which has students from pre-Kindergarten to the sixth grade, condoms will be available for any student of any age that asks.

Any age? Well surely you don't mean Kindergarden through 3rd grade, right?

“I don’t know a magic age to put on it, do you?” said Dr. Beth Singer, school superintendent.

 Yes, yes I do. How about no age at all? HAHAHAHA Singer, you are crazy!!! So funny too! I remember something else that's funny. Cancer! OK, that's not funny either, although I can't imagine that Singer was serious.

Speaking of cancer though, let's take her idea one step further. Presumably, the school is giving out condoms because "Well the kids are going to do it anyways, why not protect them?" EXACTLY!!! Which is why we should be giving them cigarettes!!!

No really! Not the bubble-gum kind, but honest-to-God nicotine and tobacco! The kids are going to smoke anyways, so why don't we pass out cigarettes that are extremely low in toxins! And we won't call their parents, we'll just let the counselor make the call if the fifth-grade student is mature enough to handle smoking.

It's a genius idea that I should really look into trying to pull off.

The story goes on to say that parents can't say no to the policy, although an update courtesy of The Boston Globe says that condoms will only be made available to students in grades 5-12.

Two huge, glaring flaws in this story. First, a parent should always be able to say no. Yeah we got some bad apple parents out there, but mom and dad should still get a say in how their child is educated sexually. Two (and I'm stealing this point from Dunning), a fifth-grader wanting condoms for sex (as opposed to blowing it up like a balloon) should raise all sorts of red flags.

Presumably, the fifth-grader will be having sex with another student. Let's say the girl asking for condoms is a fifth-grader in a K-8 school. How do we know that she isn't being pressured by some 8th-grade boy who wants to **** anything that moves? Sounds like abuse to me, but the school would never know. And if you don't think that kind of thing could happen, you're crazy.

Hell, just this past February, a middle-school student in Oregon was charged with SIX counts of first-degree sodomy. To think that middle-school peer pressure doesn't extend toward the sexual realm is naive here in 2010.

And even if you think that the 7th-grader asking for condoms is mature enough to make sexual decisions, well, he/she is not. According to this study from the American Journal of Sociology, young girls and boys engaging in sex can absolutely decimate their self esteem. So just because your child might be ready, there's no way to know if his partner is.

Perfect solution. If a middle-school student is asking for condoms so they can have sex, call the parents. Let them deal with it, instead of a school run by a woman who is intelligently bankrupt.

And a thief too, since she'll probably steal my cigarette idea.