The Nov 3 issue of the New Yorker featured an article, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” about sexual and marital habits in red and blue states, especially among teenagers. The findings reported on in the article are a powerful counter argument to the superior stance of most conservatives on issues of marriage, sex and morality. A sampling:

• In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho and West Virginia – all red states in that year’s elections.
• The highest teen pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas -- also all red states at that time.
• By contrast, the lowest divorce rates were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Maine – all blue states except North Dakota.
• The 5 states with the lowest average age at marriage are also all red, while the 5 highest are all blue. Which makes sense when you also know that age at time of marriage is a big factor in predicting whether a couple will divorce.
• People also start families earlier in red states – in part because they are far more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than having an abortion.

As the Bristol Palin saga showed, conservatives “forgive” teen pregnancies as long as the kids have the baby and marry. But this model of marriage is highly problematic.

June Carbone, co-author of an upcoming book on this topic, summarizes the data as follows: “The paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist and author of book titled “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” suggests that public and symbolic commitment to marriage remains strong in red states but falls down in practice, whereas in blue states, commitment to marriage is more discreet or private, but marriage in practice works well. In short, conservatives talk the talk but liberals walk the walk.


So what about those teens? How is it that the 16 year old daughter of a governor can still get accidentally pregnant in 2008?

The data is revealing here, too. It shows that the vast majority of white evangelical Protestant teenagers believe in abstaining from sex before marriage -- yet as a group they are more sexually active than mainline Protestants, Jews, and Mormons. The average age of their “sexual debut” is barely 16; the only group that starts earlier is black Protestants.

Abstinence programs at best postpone sexual activity and ironically they lose effect if too many teens take “purity pledges,” which apparently only work if perceived as a ticket to a selective and superior clique. What does work to prevent teen pregnancy is close-knit families and systems that support a teen’s goals and dreams beyond simply not having sex – say, for education and a career. Kids with something to lose are more careful.

And carefulness seems to be the real problem. Because even though they have more and earlier sex than most adolescents, evangelical Protestant teens are significantly less likely to use contraception.

The New Yorker article speculates about the reasons for this, including that the kids feel it would suggest they are looking for the sex they have sworn to avoid, and also that abstinence-only education tends to stress that condoms aren’t really that effective.

To those, I’ll add the issue of availability. All the liberal baby boomer parents I know were anxious to make sure that their teenage children had access to contraception and used it whenever they started having sex (even those that preferred their kids wait a while). Conservative Christian parents just aren’t going to do that. And many of these teens live in smaller towns where it’s harder to obtain protection anonymously, or at all.

Still, you may wonder, how stupid must these kids be to think they can’t get knocked up? And what’s the big deal about having a condom just in case you need it?

So I’ll step from behind the curtain and confess: None of these findings surprise me, because as a teenager in the 1970’s, I was an evangelical Christian (and remained one until my early twenties), as were most of my high school and college friends. And I saw the same behaviors back then.

In the 1970’s, HIV wasn’t an issue, but pregnancy certainly was. Every Christian I knew worried about it (because they opposed abortion and so considered an unplanned pregnancy a potential life de-railer) and yet I knew all too many intelligent Christians who had sex without protection. This includes people I went to college with – in a blue state, no less – who could have easily made a trip to the student health center or a drugstore without any repercussions. Yet none of the Christians I knew prepared for the sex that many of them had. Some got pregnant, and others got lucky.

And the reason for not using contraception? In every case, it was that planning for having sex seemed to us to be an even greater sin than having sex.* Without planning, you have what the CIA calls “plausible deniability."

The beauty of most sins is that you can argue that you were swept into them by the heat of the moment. That excuse works for a whole host of transgressions, including gambling, swearing, drinking and losing your temper. (Hell, sudden impulse or “passion” has even historically been an excuse for murder.)

But it works best of all for sex, which is something that tends to develop from a series of actions that are often considered entirely acceptable. One minute you’re kissing and everything’s kosher; the next minute, someone’s penis is inside you and you’re going to hell. Sex is the literal slippery slope of morality.

Reading the New Yorker article took me back in time 30 years, when I first crawled into the cramped back seat of a Toyota Corolla with a male friend that I was desperately in unrequited love with. Both evangelical Christians, we had an unspoken agreement to not cross “that” line, and so engaged in the famous “everything but” that should seem charmingly dated by now, but which has had an unexpected renaissance thanks to the advent of AIDS.

Despite our agreement not to have intercourse, it would have been all too easy to go just a wiggle too far. And not long after, I was fooling around with another male Christian friend (this one was in unrequited love with me), when the wiggle appeared. It was only my last second realization that I was almost certainly ovulating that gave me the strength to literally throw him off my body.

Even more than by Jesus, I was saved by that move, as neither of us would have countenanced abortion. If I’d gotten pregnant, I would have had an early and doomed marriage, like the girl I knew in high school, who went from being a party girl who slept around but never got knocked up, to converting to Christianity and then six months later being rushed into a shotgun marriage.

Most of my Christian friends didn’t get pregnant, but almost all of them married young, right after college if not sooner. And the reason was universal: They wanted to have sex. Now that people live far longer, both spouses need to work, and good incomes are hard to come by without a college education, requiring celibacy before marriage isn’t a moral strategy, but simply a recipe for premature marriage, divorce and poverty.

So, even though 35 years separate us, I can imagine all too well what happened with Bristol Palin. She is, after all, a small town girl (the Palins still live mostly in Wasilla). One raised in a conservative Christian family that supports abstinence-only education and would be “shamed” if she were discovered obtaining contraception.

So instead she'll pay the price for doing what teenagers have always done, and lose the opportunity to explore her own life. Assuming she marries her baby’s father, the odds are that they’ll divorce eventually and also that she won’t go to college or have a professional career.

Still, she might beat those odds. Her mother, who is widely assumed to have been pregnant when she eloped, did. But by that time, Sarah Palin was 24 and a college graduate. Her daughter isn’t so lucky.

* This thinking isn’t limited to Protestantism. It may actually reach its apotheosis in Catholicism, the religion I was raised in. George Carlin has a classic routine about how Catholic dogma makes planning to sin as bad as the final act. Here's his analysis of how the Church would see the act of a boy feeling up a girl:

“It was a sin for you to wanna feel up Ellen, it was a sin for you to plan to feel up Ellen, it was a sin for you to figure out a place to feel up Ellen, it was a sin to take Ellen to the place to feel her up, it was a sin to try to feel her up, and it was a sin to feel her up. There were six sins in one feel, man!”