All of the child sex abuse scandal aside, this made me laugh out loud.

I come from a big Catholic extended family, and I - being a big old queen - was one of the few in my generation of cousins who didn't have to get married because of pregnancy. I'm also one of the few who hasn't been divorced at least once.

In my Mom's generation, at least two of her sisters and one of her brothers "had" dot get married - and that was back in the 50's.

Of course, not many of the younger generation are Catholic anymore. But what's really gross is that a few have become southern Baptists. Give me the Papists anyday.

Perhaps they mean to encourage parents to INSURE the chastity of their children. After all, virginity is a valuable commodity. Perhaps the insurance could cover the cost of hymen reconstruction surgery.

Or the decades of therapy.

When are they going to be litigated out of existence?

This would annoy me if I didn't already know how very little attention that most Catholics pay to the opinions of the clergy on matters sexual.

Here I thought the parents 'leading by example' were supposed to be chaste, too...

Once upon a time, this kind of cultural instillation of sexual repression possibly helped tame a wild society and establish a civilized order, but now we've so outgrown the need for it that it has become damaging. Now that there are sanitary conditions, birth control, penicillin, punishment for rapists, and other modern evolutions that make sex a lot less risky than it once was, why oh why do we still need to program in this fear of our sexuality? It makes people very unwell.