Mississippi abstinence only sex education course compares girls to dirty peppermint patties. No longer "clean and valuable" after she had been handled.

Courtesy of the LA Times:  

Marie Barnard was delighted when, after decades of silence on the topic, Mississippi passed a law requiring school districts to teach sex education. But the lesson involving the Peppermint Pattie wasn't what she had in mind for her sons. 

The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became. 

"They're using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex — that she's been used," said Barnard, who works in public health. "That shouldn't be the lesson we send kids about sex." 

She and other parents lobbied the district to teach about contraception, not just abstinence. After all, as she and other parents noted, 76% of Mississippi teenagers report having sex before the end of high school. 

Mississippi has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, with 50 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19 in 2011 — compared with 31 per 1,000 nationally. A third of all babies born in Mississippi are to teenage mothers. Access to contraceptives is low, especially in some rural areas where drug stores have been known to refuse to sell condoms to minors. 

Once again it is so helpful of religion to forever leave the burden of chastity with the woman, while giving men a free pass.

A girl who engages in consensual sex before marriage, is a dirty piece of mint filled confection, that is now all disgusting and unfit for love. While a man who sticks his willie in every piece of tail that passes his way, is considered experienced and celebrated by his peers.

A boy who has sex becomes a man. A girl who does the same becomes a slut.

In this day and age the hypocrisy is almost impossible to believe, and yet in some communities it as unchanged as it was back in the days when young men bartered with fathers for the virginity of their daughters, as one would barter for a for any other piece of property or livestock.

However there are a valiant few who desperately try to bring the ignorant into the 21st Century with the rest of us.

Sanford Johnson, deputy outreach coordinator for Mississippi First, an education policy group, encountered these values while addressing the school board in Hollandale, a dusty, rural community with a dilapidated downtown of shuttered stores and peeling paint. 

Johnson thought he had made a good case for contraception education when he shared disturbing statistics: The local birthrate was 73 out of 1,000 females between 15 and 19; the national rate is 29.4 per 1,000. 

He encountered the usual gasps of shock when he revealed that the rate of chlamydia, at 1,346.8 per 100,000 people, was nearly double the rest of Mississippi, and approaching triple the U.S. rate. 

But later Johnson got a call from someone who had attended the board meeting — telling him that people who have sex before marriage don't go to heaven. The board voted for abstinence-only. 

 "People who have sex before marriage don't go to heaven."

And that my friends is when you stand up and walk away.

Because despite the rash of teen pregnancies and the chlamydia epidemic there is no hope of convincing these idiots of anything.

For them all they need to know about love, marriage, and sex, is contained in a misogynistic text, written thousands of years ago, by a group of men who clearly feared and despised women.