Virgins and Virtuecrats

When conservatives in the past decade have declared that the key to reducing teen pregnancy is teens having less sex, they were mocked by liberals. That's just old-fogey moralizing, many said. We should accept the ever-rising sexuality activity among teens as inevitable.

This week, the old fogies seem to have pulled out a win. New studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control show that the percentage of American high-school students who have had sexual intercourse declined steadily during the 1990s, and in 2001 fell to the lowest level since 1990. Today, it can be said that the typical American 12th-grade high-school boy or girl has

yet had intercourse. Meanwhile, teen pregnancy is at "the lowest rate ever recorded" in the United States, according to a government study.

Conservatives should certainly take a bow since they helped bring the topic to the foreground in a way that probably helped. But there are plenty of other reasons for the drop in pregnancies among teens. It may be that the movies and music now so relentlessly promote cheap, superficial sex that teens are rebelling against it. If Hollywood and MTV are telling teens to have quick and cheap sex, they sense this means they ought to do the reverse! Or maybe a generation of kids saw that sex and the resultant babies brought nothing approaching happiness to the teens of the 1980s and 1990s.

Here is a fourth possibility: that teens are not so different than the rest of us. Virtue generally is on the rise in the United States. Teens may be simply participating in an overall national revival of personal standards.

Setting aside the recent corporate lying scandal as confined to those who make northward of $1 million a year, it can be argued that nearly all trends related to personal virtue today are positive. Commentators may bemoan society's lack of moral standards or that Americans no longer fear their God. Statistics say otherwise.

Consider: