(granted the specific rank order of the needs is open for debate, and indeed fluid over time and context, but I don’t think the need for food, or safety, or self esteem is really up for questioning … is it? Nor the basic idea that there are lower and higher order needs, and that it’s a good idea to get the lower ones squared away first so you don’t starve or freeze to death, but don’t ignore the higher ones? Edit: but in honour of you point, I’ve rephrased the last part of my post )
I might be wrong here but I read @singletona082’s comment as meaning “the best way for an individual to avoid pregnancy is to not have sex. If you are going to have sex, you need to look at other ways of preventing it.”
It seems you (and a lot of other people in this thread) are confusing the act of abstinence with reliance on abstinence-only education. Personal abstinence is a very good way to not get pregnant or catch STDs; abstinence-only education is a thunderingly terrible way to try to reduce incidences of either thing.
Not to mention it brings into the world children the teabaggers have zero interest in helping these unprepared new monthers care for and educate or be anything other than ‘god’s punishment for bring a whore.’
I daresay more than a few see the destitute constantly multiplying due to shit education as a good thing since theoretically you can then leversge Jon to work over without clocking it because Steve REALLY needs a job and Jon can’t strike for better conditions or have time enough off between work and exhaustion from work to try bettering himself or his family.
After all if you run the illegals out and robots are not yet able to fill menial jobs you need a labor force from somewhere. You also don’t want said labor force too able to self educate or to have too much time to do more than spend on petty vices to distract from their shit lives.
(dodgy scan, but the other versions online are paywalled by the thieves at Elsevier)
Yeah, people prioritise their needs and desires, and there are some broad commonalities in how they tend to do so. But Maslow’s hypothesis was almost 100% wrong in detail.
So can we stop with the moral relativism bullshit?
You use that phrase. It does not mean what you think it means. Absolutism… is that thing that could be good or could be bad… it’s a different conversation, but that’s the concept you mean.
The liberal version of that is “YOU’RE A LESBIAN.” “Mooooom.” “I will support you, your Dad will DEFINITELY support you. Just go with it until you’re fifteen. We don’t want to cap any of your boyfriends… but we’ll buy a shotgun if we have to.”
Which is why the forced-birth crowd also tend to be opponents of contraception, despite the obvious contradiction involved.
Anti-abortion activism has fuck-all to do with “protecting unborn babies”; it’s all about maintaining the threat of unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for women who have unauthorised sex. Similar motivation drives abstinence-only education.
Practicing abstinence is the best solution, but almost everyone who says it is promoting “abstinence-only education,” which is not the same thing and has demonstrably poor results.
In the UK at least, marrying under the age of 18 is almost unheard of (about 3000 people in 2013, stats here), that’s about 0.6% of all the marriages that year. Most people get married in their late twenties or early thirties (you know, once you’re an adult).
Mind you, marriage rates have been dropping here since the 1970’s, and 70% of marriages are civil partnerships, as opposed to religious.
So if by “people of European descent” you mean Europeans, nope, we don’t get married that early, and we don’t do it because “god told us to”.
The UK is (was?) also a mostly Protestant country. My family is a mix of Catholic and Protestant, and I’ve only seen this from the Catholic side (not actually in my own family, thank goodness). Certainly I don’t know any English Catholics from high school who dropped out to marry. I also don’t know a lot of fundamentalist Protestants, which I suspect would be a different picture.
The other thing you’re not taking into account is that this report is about the US, and I’m concurring from Canada. The people I knew were all children of parents who immigrated in the post-war wave.
When I was in high school we used to talk a lot about “stuck in the 50s” families, who thought they were carrying on important ethnic traditions in the new country while the old country had sensibly discarded them decades ago.
Or, as one of my friends put it after visiting her aunt and uncle in Italy when she was 18, “my 13 year old cousin is allowed to stay out later than me.”
Finally, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, we’re taking about a small but not non-zero percentage. The vast majority of girls in my high school got married in the adult age range you mentioned. It’s not the norm to marry at 16. My point was it’s not unheard of either, and it’s not just people from the third world.
The UK is sort of Protestant, it depends on how you phrase the question. About 60% of people consider themselves Christian, but anywhere between 50 and 70% of people would say that they’re are not religious.
For example, my little brother, who got married in our village church, but isn’t religious, and only goes into a church for social reasons.
Anecdotally, my French friends think that the British get married more than ‘usual’, and we have the same feeling about the US.
I got that, which is why my initial comment wasn’t addressed to singletona082 originally, but to @TheChineseWatch who I got the impression was teasing out how abstinence isn’t really promoted as a birth control method but rather as a moral imperative i. e. to protect virginity.
The thing we are dancing around here, and which looks like disagreement is that in practice using abstinence as a way to protect our young from unwanted pregnancy and STDs means we are necessarily conflating two different things, one of which gets avoided all together:
When should people start having sex and how do we teach them to have sex safely.
Singletona082 is only getting pushback for getting pushy about being right.
And Elvis started dating Priscilla when she was 14 and he was 24. Our culture used to be a lot more tolerant of pedophiles, at least the ones who were good at rock & roll.
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