Apparently it’s Sexual Responsibility Week, but the irony must be lost on those well-intentioned people who had the idea for such an event. “Sexual responsibility” seems to imply that a college student, the target market of this campaign, can have an active, premarital sexual life while still remaining more or less “responsible.” The university will very likely teach us about how “safe sex” prevents nasty things like sexually transmitted infections, and people from the Women’s Center have already made the rounds between many classes, informing us of the dangers of rape and pleading with us to help them “eliminate” the scourge from our society. I could not be more supportive of attempts to reduce, and even eliminate if possible, STIs and rape in college life. But I cannot take a movement seriously that fails miserably in addressing the root cause of these unnecessary burdens.

There has been a heated debate in recent years over the way in which our society should approach sex education, particularly on whether or not abstinence should be included as a serious alternative to “safe sex.” Authorities tell students that we are going to “do it anyway,” so we might as well be taught how to do it “safely.” To grasp the insanity of this reasoning, imagine for a moment that you are happily married. You are leaving the house to head off on a weeklong business trip in another state, and your wife stops you at the door with a box of condoms. When questioning her as to her intentions, she explains, “Just in case you have an affair, I want you to be safe.” Just because we as students are taught how to have “safer” premarital sex does not mean that such behavior is good for us, or the society in which we live.

Considering that condoms don’t even protect against all STIs, there is absolutely no way to fully prevent the spread of STIs unless people that have them abstain from sex. It doesn’t matter if everyone regularly tests for STIs or wears condoms religiously; if we continue to indulge in drunkenness and free love, the spread of STIs is inevitable. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if every college student is taught about the definition of “consent,” for if a great enough number of those students spend their time binge drinking and casually hooking up in Isla Vista, occurrences of rape will be depressingly predictable. The problem is not that one in four teenage girls has an STI, or that a disturbing number of women in college are raped, but that we refuse to change the culture and our way of life that lends itself to these abominations.

That is why there is an inherent flaw in sex education, even at the college level, that focuses primarily on “safe sex.” The university may be able to offer you all types of services, such as Student Health, that focus on “prevention,” “detection” and other tips on “safety,” but it utterly fails to actually help students become liberated from the destructive lifestyles that fuel the very aberrations they claim to despise. The university has no intention of providing resources that help students indulge in the empowerment of modesty and morality, because as far as it is concerned, we are going to get blasted on weekends and have premarital sex regardless. Why bother?

This outrageous proposition assumes that youth are no more than sexual animals without a grasp on morality and self-discipline. Nonsense. We are the future of our country and the foundation of our society, and we should therefore reject such outright condescension and mistrust. We deserve more respect as human beings, yet more importantly, we deserve better for ourselves than continuing to make self-destructive lifestyle choices. If we wish to stop STIs and shameful occurrences of rape in our college community, we need not look to authorities, be it teachers or politicians, for lectures on “safe sex.” It is up to us to take personal responsibility for our own lives and radically change the depraved, sex-obsessed culture we live in.