One of the more mystifying things about sex is we expect 13 year olds to make the right decisions when 40 year old adults are still making bad decisions about sex.

I came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis. At the time, getting HIV was a death sentence. I knew it. I knew I needed to take precautions if I wanted to have sex. I also remember that sometimes I screwed up and had unsafe sex anyway. I was in my early 30’s at the time. Way to old to being making a mistake like that, but I still, embarrassingly, did.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone here, makes mistakes. It is a normal part of life. Some of these mistakes, say lending a friend a hundred dollars who promises to pay you back on pay day, are sad lessons but not particularly life altering. Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are.

Given the siren call of sex, making a mistake about sex is pretty much par for the course for most people. Sex is mighty tempting and the chances that you will make the right decision 100% of the time is fairly remote. People make mistakes.

Which leads me to this idea that allowing a young woman to have birth control is giving her permission to have sex. Maybe. The trouble is she doesn’t need your permission to have sex. The decision to have or not have sex is in her hands. The idea that she will never give into temptation is wishful thinking at best.

Christian doctrine will save her. Probably not. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years. I heard the word of God on a fairly regular basis and I still wanted to have sex. I wanted it so badly that any rational precautions I could have taken, weren’t taken — mostly because I was too terrified to ask the pharmacists for condoms. Think about that I was more afraid of the pharmacist than the wrath of God. This is a challenging theological problem for Christians.

So pontificate all you want on how giving Birth Control to young women is giving them permission to have sex. But it is cruel to expect young women to never error and crueler still to saddle her with a 18 year project of raising a child for making a mistake.

What is irritating me most about this stand is that the good Christians here are more interested in punishing the young woman for her mistake than giving her assistance to sort through the tumultuous time of raging hormones and sexual temptation. Expecting her to make mistakes should be a given, and this why birth control is a God send.