Sex Is Solved !

Why didn’t they think of this before?

The California Assembly, where every seat is up for election in November, has passed a bill requiring the state’s sex-education teachers to instruct their students to refrain from sexual intercourse “until they are ready for marriage.” If this courageous action doesn’t bring premarital sex to a dead stop in California, probably nothing will.

Like every measure passed by the state Legislature, this one is no doubt meant to be taken seriously. Young people simply must be told to abstain from sex until they enter into and “honor and respect” the institution of monogamous marriage. As every parent can testify, all you have to do is tell a teen-ager not to do something and lo! that thing is not done. The Assembly’s approach is ingenious in its simplicity. It also would not cost any money. These are important considerations in an election year. If only the Assembly had the wit to act earlier, 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, California by now would surely have been freed from the plagues of teen-age pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

The only thing we don’t like about the Assembly’s action is that it leaves it up to sex-education teachers to instruct young people to abstain from sex. Sex-education teachers sometimes mumble or are otherwise hard to understand. We think that it would be far more effective for the Assembly just to order teen-agers to remain chaste until marriage. Teen-agers might snicker at teachers or even parents who told them to do that. Let the word come from the Assembly, though, and it will no doubt be treated with all the respect it deserves.