The whole Purity Ball concept frightens me:
It just seems wrong for fathers to have this type of command over their daughters…
If girls choose to be abstinent? Fine.
If they choose to have a sacred-ish ritual over it? Umm… kinda creepy.
But to have their fathers swear to protect them from the “evils” of a hook-up culture?
*shudder*
But after dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”
The gesture signaled that the fathers would guard their daughters from what evangelicals consider a profoundly corrosive “hook-up culture.” The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed.
Not weirded out yet? Wait for it…
“It’s also good for me,” said Terry Lee, 54, who attended the ball for a second year, this time with his youngest daughter, Rachel, 16. “It inspires me to be spiritual and moral in turn. If I’m holding them to such high standards, you can be sure I won’t be cheating on their mother.”
Because, without the Purity Ball, he’d be whoring it up with his daughter’s college tuition…?
And don’t forget this gem:
Every half-hour, Mr. [Randy] Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.
At this particular ball, the girls signed no pledges. Just the fathers.
“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” Mr. Wilson, 49, told the men. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”
There’s a section in Al Franken‘s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right called “Savin’ It!” In it, he asks pro-abstinence-education figures (like John Ashcroft) to share their own abstinence stories. Essentially, the joke is that these people who believe all sex before marriage is wrong and evil and destructive did not wait until marriage themselves.
Were they damaged by pre-marital sex? Hardly.
I wonder how many of these fathers waited till marriage…
If they did, wouldn’t that be a much more powerful statement to make than the pledges?
“The culture says you’re free to sleep with as many people as you want to,” said Khrystian Wilson, 20, one of the Wilsons’ seven children, including five girls. “What does that get you but complete chaos?”
Ironically, as the article notes, “most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.”
Feel free to share your stories of abstinence.
Or stories of how pre-marital sex absolutely wrecked your life 🙂
(If it’s not clear, I’m not against abstinence. If you choose it, more power to you. I just don’t think sex — with proper protection — is the evil they’re making it out to be.)
(Thanks to Maria for the link!)
[tags]atheist, atheism, Jesus[/tags]
