Another fascinating article from the New Yorker: Red Sex, Blue Sex. It turns out that evangelicals and liberals have distinctly different attitudes and behaviors in the sexual behavior of their adolescent children, and not in the way you might expect.

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Of course, as a liberal I find this appalling (talk about keepin’ ’em barefoot and pregnant!), not least because not only is this evangelical group more likely to get pregnant, they’re also more likely to get STDs. The gift that keeps on giving. Of course it follows that both their educational and lifetime income levels are lower as well. Higher divorce rates, too. These are American family values?

But the most interesting factoid in the article was this nugget about those icky (and incredibly Freudian) chastity pledge programs like True Love Waits:

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Like I said, fascinating stuff.