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I still don't really understand why so many people have moral qualms about sex. I mean it's a natural human function, just like eating, drinking and sleeping. We feel sexual urges for the same reason we feel hunger, thrist and fatigue: it's our body telling us what it requires of us.
Now you may say that sex is slightly different because there are risks attached, and while there is some truth in this, you have to understand that all these dangers can be minimised in the exercise of caution. For instance, we wouldn't stop eating food because of the risk of catching food poisoning because we understand that so long as we prepare properly and cautiously, that we can greatly reduce the risk of contracting any such disease. And it's the same with sex: it's not the act of having sex exactly that puts us in danger, it's the fact that we should undertake such an action underprepared. So in the same way that we can reduce food poisoning by telling people how to prepare food properly, we can minimise STD's and unwanted pregnancies by teaching people how to be adequately prepared before engaging in sexual intercourse.
Now twilochik, you're talking about abstinance as an effective way of preventing the dangers associated with sex? Well it is undoubtedly, but it makes as much sense as me saying that I'm going to lie in bed all day to prevent myself falling over and breaking my arm. Sure it'll work (I'll never get injured), but at the same time by lying in bed all day all the benefits that I'll be missing out on will by far outweigh all the slight risks that I'll be avoiding.....you get where I'm coming from? By extinguishing our desires (be they sexual or anything else) we cease to be human, as Neitzche said: "....to exterminate the passions and desires merely to do away with their folly and it's unpleasant consequences......is castration.....to attack passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots".
This, then, brings me to morality. The sole problem with American morality (on the whole) is that it is far too attached to outdated Christian morality. Even though church and state should be seperate, most American laws and political issues cling fairly tightly to the morality of the Bible, and god help a president if he professes to be an atheist. Now I don't have a problem with Christianity at all (many of my close friends are Christians) but Christian morality is completely useless at best, dangerous at worst. It's just a series of "thou shalt nots" - that's not morality, that's dogma. Christian morality seeks to tell human beings how to act (or, more to the point, how not to act), where as philosophical morality seeks to tell people instead how to decide how to act.
Telling kids that they shouldn't be having sex isn't going to acheive anything, just like the "don't take drugs" approach doesn't work. Instead, as someone pointed out before, you should be warning them about all the potential risks in having sex (and taking drugs) and how to prevent any harm coming to yourself or anyone else.
Similarly (and this is not a dig at all Americans, just the conservative ones), the complete convolusion of morality over there can be summed up by looking at their television (we get shitloads of it over here). You can shoot 30 people in the space of 15 seconds and that's fine, but expose a breast or say the word "shit" and all of a sudden the program is unfit for TV. To compare this to Australian TV, on a program here called the "Footy Show" (a panel discussion about AFL football) one of the hosts of the show, Sam Newman, had his pants pulled down and had his crown jewels exposed on live TV. The station had about 200 phone calls complaining or something, but the funny part is when the show was broadcast in Perth (2 hours later due to time differences) that part was censored and the station receieved at least twice that number of phone calls complaining that his penis hadn't been shown on TV. Doesn't really have any relevance to what I'm talking about, but I though that was pretty funny (and can anone tell me what the problem is with showing naked flesh on TV? Doesn't half the population have a penis anyway? Haven't we all seen one before?).
Well that's it. Just had to have a quick vent. 
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, actually i guess that applies to everyone, everywhere
