Dickie's Quickies

According to the Abstinence Clearinghouse, the above item is perfect as a giveaway for your next presentation:

These suckers, in cherry flavor, are a fun way to get the message to teens: Don't Be a Sucker! Save Sex For Marriage.

Um, insert your own double entendre. Thanks to feministing for the head's up on this one.

Speaking of abstinence, a principal in Culver City, CA now prevents touching of any kind on campus - including holding hands - Andy Griffith would even be appalled. Hat tip to Hit and Run.

If Assistant Principal Hiram Celis saw them, they'd get an earful.

"When I'm out there and see something inappropriate, I'll let them know. I don't think parents know they have boyfriends and girlfriends," he said, adding that he believes holding hands could "lead to more intimate situations."

(Principal)Kosch agreed. "You let them hold hands, next thing they're on the grass" kissing, he said. When he sees two students holding hands, he said, he usually gives them a funny look or simply says, "no contact."

As Bill Maher noted in Salon:

New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids.

But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?

Seriously, when I was a teenager, the only kids having anal intercourse were the ones who missed. My idea of lubrication was oiling my bike chain. If I had known I could have been getting porn star sex the same year I took Algebra II, simply by joining up with the Christian right, I'd have been so down with Jesus they would have had to pry me out of the pew.

For a bunch of teens raised on creationism, these red state kids today are pretty evolved -- sexually, anyway, and for that they can thank all who joined forces to try and legislate away human nature, specifically the ineluctable urge of teenagers to hump.

Yes, the "What do we tell the children?" crowd apparently decided not to tell them anything. Because people who talk about pee-pees are potty-mouths. And so armed with limited knowledge, and believing regular, vaginal intercourse to be either immaculate or filthy dirty, these kids did with their pledge what everybody does with contracts: they found loopholes. Two of them to be exact.

So, maybe a sucker is exactly the right thing to be giving out? It's code.

Over in Iraq, they are giving the U.S. a lesson in democracy by ousting the Interior Minister who is in charge of troops that torture. The great irony being that Donald Rumsfeld will probably take credit for this since the Pentagon headed up the investigation of the charges.

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, whose ministry is accused of operating clandestine prisons where some detainees were tortured, will vacate his job shortly, security and political sources in Baghdad said yesterday.
Mr. Jabr has been under pressure to step down since a Nov. 15 raid by U.S. forces of a secret prison in the Baghdad neighborhood of Jadriyah, where 166 prisoners were discovered, most of them Sunni Muslims and some showing signs of torture.