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Irresponsible event encourages immorality

By Scott Tibbs, September 24, 2008

The front page of the September 18 Indiana Daily Student featured a large full color picture of three students wearing pig noses and pig ears placing condoms on fake bananas. The back page had another large full color photo of a student placing a condom on a fake banana.

Is this really necessary? Did the IDS really need to have large full-color pictures of people putting condoms on fake bananas on the front page of Thursday's newspaper, especially considering that the newspaper is distributed throughout downtown and in various grocery stores in Bloomington? Did the silly pictures actually serve to enlighten people and advance the discussion of how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases in a substantive way? Or was it sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism?

While Trojan may believe that they are performing a public service by educating people about condom use, I think they are missing the point. I found the following statement worthy of comment. Trojan Communications Manager and Sexual Health Educator Kari Kuka, interviewed by the IDS, had this to say:

"We can't get into high schools," Kuka said, "so the best we can do is hopefully start education so that every college student knows the risks of engaging in unprotected sex and why it's so important to use a condom every time."

Why is it "so important to use a condom every time", Ms. Kuka? Is it because people are having sex with people they do not know as well as they should? If you know your partner well enough, you should know if he or she has a sexually transmitted disease. To put it another way, if you are not sure whether someone has a sexually transmitted disease or not, why are you having sex with that person? If you knew for certain that someone has AIDS or some other STD, would you knowingly place yourself at risk, even with a condom as "protection"?

The answer is not to use barrier methods to protect against disease, the answer is avoiding sex with someone who is infected with a sexually transmitted disease. The only certain way to do that is to avoid sex until marriage and to marry someone who has made the same choice. Some will scoff at this and claim it is impossible, irresponsible or unrealistic, but the fact of the matter is that STD's are behaviorally spread diseases and the only sure way to avoid the disease is to avoid the behavior that puts one at risk of the disease.

Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. -- 1 Corinthians 6:18