My personal ethical and moral framework says it’s healthy to explore your sexuality before marriage, that sexual attraction and gender dynamics are more fluid than solid, and that there are few things more horrible than rape.

But I also find myself called on a very deep level to talk with everyone - regardless of religious creed - about sexuality education. There is great value in helping even religiously conservative parents learn to have open and honest conversations with their children and teenagers about sex.

Call me a lunatic bandwagonner, but proclaiming sex is only to be strictly associated with lifetime marriage and conception pretty much reduces the scope of personal interests. Let alone the role of women in society and families.

Isil, I am going to have to agree to disagree with you on this one. There have been times in my life where I would have jumped on this particular bandwagon with you.

However, since I have started this public, Internet conversation about adolescent sexuality I have spoken with an increasing number of deeply religious (non-abusive) parents who I think do a fabulous job of raising their kids. Some of them even do a good job of providing information-based sexuality education along side their conversations about sexual morals and ethics.

Frankly, I have been completely won over by the absolute need to have ethics and morals integrated into sexuality education. I might disagree with someone else’s moral stance, but it is important for teenagers to know where their families come from on this point.

Furthermore, it is absolutely critical that teenagers are pressed to find their own moral and ethical stance on issues of sex and sexuality within an appropriate framework. The absolute dearth of conversation along these lines is one of the fundamental reasons there is so much sexual dysfunction and pain in the world. I’ve written a number of posts on these topics - try searching for moral in the search box to your right.

The sensationalism that has been brought to this current case, and others in the past, has marred the seriousness of of the issue of sexuality. Particularly, the mass media tends to gloss over how our children are institutionalized into the culture of sex, both inside inappropriate religious sects and in the generalized culture that most of us breathe everyday.

I have been asked about the current events by several people, and I’ve found myself at something of a loss of what to say besides: “Well, it’s bad.” I can go into some depth of a conversation about why it’s bad, or how to help these children move forward, but this is generally not what my questioners have been interested in. Rather, they have wanted me to talk about the specifics of the sexual abuse in a sensationalistic way, detailing and condemning each bad event. I rebelled. Thus, my simplistic, and apparently not clearly enough ironic, blog post title. Thank you for encouraging me to clarify my position!

While I am in total agreement that sex abusers are bad, I don’t think we need the religious and polygamist labels, unless you are trying to say that atheistic, monogamous sex abusers are NOT bad. Adding adjectives like that is sensational, and one of the things that really annoys me about the mainstream media.