This weekend, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police department co-sponsored a pro-abstinence sex-education event for area teens called “Choose Purity.” Now, despite controversy over the moral and practical value of such advice, it’s not actually unusual that an governmental organization in the United States would discourage premarital sex. What is (probably? I went to a pretty progressive high school) less common is official endorsement of the connection between premarital sex and having your face gnawed off by drug addicts. From the Las Vegas Sun’s writeup of the event:
The room of about 125 parents and children watched recorded interviews with a pimp and prostitutes, learned modern-day slavery exists in the form of the sex trade, and saw grisly images of people who’d suffered at the hands of hard drugs — such as a woman who’d lost limbs in a methamphetamine lab explosion and a man who’d had his face partially gnawed off by a meth user.
“Choose Purity,” organized by an officer named Regina Coward and attended by officers wearing police department apparel and carrying guns, also involved two “Toe Tag Monologues” delivered “from the perspective of one girl who had died after abusing diet pills and one who had died after contracting a sexually transmitted disease as a prostitute.”
When asked whether she’d recruited the “Toe Tag Monologues” to perform to send the message that engaging in premarital sex meant risking death, Coward said, “Yeah, because that’s what’s happening.”
The point here, if I may presume to paraphrase the Las Vegas police department, is that just because you always wear a meth-zombie facemask during intercourse does not mean you have protected yourself from the equally insidious threat of sex-induced bulimia and/or being sold into slavery.
