Mary Jackson: Well, show me the boys’ “purity” rings, or the evidence of concern for their chastity.
Can’t speak for evangelicals but most of the young Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) men I’ve met wear “CTR” (Choose the Right) rings on their left hands. Their religion also draws no differentiation between the sexes on chastity. For both genders the rules are the same: no sex until marriage and then only with one’s spouse. Any violation of that rule almost invariably gets one excommunicated from the church.
Wider note: it should be apparent to anyone, but most clearly to educated people, why unwed motherhood has traditionally borne such a stigma.
No individual can, by themselves, raise a child to the age of five completely alone. Even with sufficient funds to make paying employment unnecessary, it can’t be done. There are too many competing obligations; child-tending by others, for at least a short period, simply can’t be avoided.
Consequently, the duty that should be on the shoulders of the absent parent falls on the single parent’s relatives and friends. These people have their own lives to live and their own necessities to acquire. They’re not going to be happy about spending their time and money helping out a person who, through poor judgment, acquired an obligation that must be met but can’t be through that individual’s own resources.
People DO help out with such situations all the time but make no mistake, it’s charity because they would almost invariably rather not spend their time and money on that task.
Young women today seem to accept unwed pregnancy as a matter of course. That’s because we’re a richer society than we used to be and the costs imposed by her partner’s absence are easier to afford for her friends and relatives. That doesn’t mean it’s not destructive and deleterious and greatly to be avoided.
I applaud those fathers who are so concerned with their daughters’ virtue. They’re demonstrating real concern and love for them by making sure they keep away from some very real and life-destroying dangers. That’s what LOVING parents do for their children.
People with attitudes like Mary’s wake up one day to find they’ve been hammered by life and they never saw it coming. As an old sailor from Maine once told me, “it wasn’t the things I didn’t know that hurt me, it was the things I knew for sure that weren’t so.”
Mary has one of those “Ooops” moments in her future.
