A new bill in Utah, vetoed on Friday by Governor Gary Herbert, tried to effectively implement abstinence-only sex education in Utah public schools. According to an article by CNN, the bill would have made it so that "Utah's teachers [would not have been] allowed to inform students about contraceptives, 'the intricacies of intercourse,' homosexuality, or sexual activity outside of marriage."

Although the idea was, luckily, defeated by Utah's governor, the fact that it became a bill in the first place shows the potential danger from such thinking. Schools can, under the bill, either have teachers talk about anatomy and HIV and AIDS or choose to not teach their pupils anything about sex at all. According to the bill's sponsor, Utah state Republican Representative Bill Wright, sexual education should be conducted at home.

While it's true that parents should have some sort of "the birds and bees" talk with their children, it doesn't mean it will happen. "Should" and "will" are two very different things. In fact, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, although parents can opt out of school-based sexual education for their children, most do not. It seems that parents themselves do not want to discuss the "intricacies of intercourse" with their children either. And if parents do not want to do it and teachers cannot do it, how will these children learn how to protect themselves when they will, inevitably, have sex at some point in their lives?

Now, some may say that the only way to stop teenagers from having sex is by not talking to them about it. They may believe that if teenagers do not know about sex and only think about it as something that happens after marriage, then teenage sex out of wedlock will not happen.
But according to a report by the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California San Francisco, a 2001 periodical by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reported that, "A large body of evaluation research clearly shows that sex and HIV education programs included in this review do not increase sexual activity. ... To the contrary, some sex and HIV education programs delay the onset of sex, reduce the frequency of sex, or reduce the number of sexual partners."

The fact of the matter is that abstinence-only sexual education programs do not work. According to a January 2010 New York Times article, Cecile Roberts, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, an analysis from the Guttmacher Institute, a not-for-profit organization focused on reproductive rights, reported that increasing pregnancy and abortion rates "[make] it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work." It is disturbing that lawmakers continually attempt to create abstinence-only sexual education programs when the overwhelming evidence is that teaching about sex not only helps ensure safe sex, but may help prevent teenagers from having sex in the first place.

And let's not forget about the most outrageous part of the bill-the fact that homosexuality is somehow analogous to sex outside of wedlock and contraception. It's a ridiculous act of bigotry that implies that we can, in the same way we are trying to prevent teenage sex, "prevent" people from becoming gay by not explaining the complexities of homosexuality. Not only is this untrue, but it creates an atmosphere of intolerance and ignorance and should not be allowed. But then again, ignorance is exactly what these lawmakers wanted. Instead of creating an informed public capable of making its own, safe decisions, this bill serves to act as the negligent parent, refusing to understand the reality of its children and hoping that by refusing to interfere with development, the children will somehow come to understand the way the way the world works when and only when the parent decides the time is right.

This, to me, is the definition of ignorance and stupidity. Premarital sex exists whether lawmakers want to believe it or not But ignoring the concept does not mean it will go away. When has that ever worked before? Instead of pretending premarital sex doesn't exist, we have to educate teenagers about how to have safe sex and how to protect themselves. Closing your eyes to what you define as a problem never makes it go away- because it's still there as soon as you open your eyes.