It’s ‘Fucking what? Friday. Which means we look at something stupid someone has said or written during the week.

Yep, pretty much the same as any other day, really, with slightly more alliteration.

Christina Odone writes for eminent British rag the Telegraph. Her columns are always good for a bit of a chuckle, the most recent one being no exception. She thinks an increase in Faith Schools will effectively combat teen pregnancy.

Here is a question I would like someone to answer: how many girls in faith schools get pregnant in their teens? The second question I’d like to see answered is why HAS no one examined this question? But I suspect I know the answer: so many local education authorities are suspicious of faith schools (because of their academic excellence, and their relative independence) that they are not eager to find out yet another advantage they offer children and parents.

One might be inclined to suggest that there’s a good reason Kentucky Fried Movie (all those aeons ago) included the (fictional) trailer for Catholic High School Girls in Trouble. One might also be inclined to point out the signal failure of retarded shit like Abstinence Only Sex Education, which is largely pushed, apparently by religious folk and other people who seem to want to own their fellow humans.

On the other hand, one could simply point out that this argument is the functional equivalent of saying, “I have no data (that I am willing to present), so I’m just going to make some shit up that sounds good to me.” – Hardly the most intelligent approach when seeking to advocate a position on public policy, surely? Not that it hasn’t been arse-emptying terrifyingly common down the years, but come on. Even my kid’s starting to learn that sort of shit is fucking retarded.

But it gets better.

Respect has to permeate every aspect of every child’s day. In faith schools, it does: school children are taught respect for God, for others,  for faith, for their school buildings. The notion that everyone is equally special in God’s eyes is inculcated from prayer to playground.

You fucking what?

Okay, maybe this does happen. In which case faith schools are doing something I find baffling: teaching shit that goes against a major pillar of their fucking religions. At least the Abrahamic ones. YHVH doesn’t fucking love and respect everyone, and in no wise is everyone equal in his purported ineffable eyes, unless you consider “all humans are equally tarred with the foul brush of Sin, doomed to burn in Hell forever unless they kowtow to an unknowable total bastard” as being a sort of equality. I suppose it is, really. In the alleged sight of God, we’re all disgusting little worms, created specifically to be punished for eternity unless we somehow manage to (by one way or another of many varied ways of which He won’t even unambiguously divulge the fucking right one) become one of the In Crowd.

And that’s precisely what I’m talking about. You’re either in or you’re out. You’re one of the right flock, or you’re going to burn (or whatever notion of eternal fucking punishment your particular sect deems – arbitrarily -  that God has set aside for all the bastards who don’t believe that hopping widdershins around a pile of old National Geographic magazines whilst chanting the Seven Names of Great Porn Actresses, or whatever your little fucking ritual is, is the Good and Right thing to Do).

This shit doesn’t teach people respect. It teaches people to consider themselves and their like-minded buddies to think they’re better than everyone else. Which, funnily enough, often leads them to behaving far fucking worse. They are, after all, the Elect. And well do we know that the Elect don’t exactly have a track record of behaving very well.

And quite apart from all this bullshit, there’s the (unspoken, but obvious) assumption that teens having sex with each other is automatically a Bad Thing, and pregnancy is the punishment for it. Now, I’m not a teen (any more, for quite a while now), or in any position where I’m likely to fall pregnant (got the wrong sort of gonads and other plumbing) but I’m not so old that I don’t remember being a teen, and from what I remember, teens will fuck. I didn’t do it until I was 17, and I had enough education to use contraception when I did, for the most part – which is why I only have one kid, rather than several, and why he was born while I was in my late 20′s. And I respect my sexual partners… rather despite than because of my religious upbringing. Hell, my religious upbringing tried to teach me that women were inferior and subject to the will of men. Cover your goddamn head, woman.

Look, teens will fuck. They can hardly avoid doing so, it’s built in by evolution. They’ll also probably be really bad at it, too, but nature doesn’t seem to give a shit about whether it employs skilled or unskilled labour. I do think that kids need to learn, academically, about sexual reproduction at a young age, and when they reach an age when they’re getting near the point of experiencing the urges and the changes and all the rest of the hoo-ha, they need to be given information about what they’re about to experience. They’re about to become a walking bag of sex hormones. Probably quite helpful if they have a little forewarning.

Probably not so helpful to be told that an invisible all-seeing dictator will be watching them toss off to the bra catalogue, or whatever.