Time Immortal

File this under “you can lead a horse to water…”

I think the good Reader can agree that Europe has evolved, in recent decades, very liberal sexual morés, and that European governments spend a lot of time and money promoting safe sex, birth control, and all the rest. I’m sure that sex-ed in European schools is probably quite comprehensive, much more so than in North America.

And what has been the result? Are European teens and young-ish adults more sexually responsible than their North American counterparts?

Apparently not: “[a] third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex.”

Almost half of participants in Vienna, Austria had drunk alcoholand had sex by the time they were 16 compared with 36% in Venice, Italy, 37% in Palma, Spain and 30% in Liverpool.

…

Those who had been drunk in the past four weeks were more likely to have had five or more partners, sex without a condom and to have regretted sex after drink or drugs in the past 12 months.

Cannabis, Cocaine or ecstasy use was linked to similar consequences.

Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.

“Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Chickens do indeed come home to roost; it was predicted, many years ago and many times since then, that comprehensive, birth control-focused sex education would increase the promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility of society.. Of course, only easily ignored conservative commentators were doing the predicting. Now that the evidence is showing that those predictions are being borne out, perhaps we can begin to re-think the damage we are doing to our children, and to ourselves?

“Up to 15 per cent of incarcerated drug users report injecting heroin and Cocaine while behind bars.” No mention is made of that other main transmission vector for the AIDS-vausing HIV virus that prisons are reputed to be hotbeds of, of course.

Of course, it has to be asked: does this revelation come as any kind of surprise to anyone?

Not entirely related, but concerning: 200,000 people live in Saskatchewan. Last year, the city of Regina handed out 2.5 million needles to drug users. Epidemic-much?

I mean, this is the man who brought us the song Cocaine (she don’t lie, she don’t lie):

Clapton was always susceptible to truth. From the time he was a boy, he knew when he had done wrong and never excused his sins as the rites of a new moral code. When Delaney Bramlett confronted Clapton on acid, and warned him that “God has given you this gift, and if you don’t use it he will take it away,” it stunned him because he knew it was true. He knew that loving Patti Harrison was wrong, which explains the agony he felt and the circumspection he practiced. After failing so often to kick his addictions, he finally turned to God for help and got it, and now kneels to pray every morning and evening. “In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.”

In some respects, I’ve always thought that there is more theology to be found in some of the great rock tracks of decades past than there is to be found in much of the stuff coming out of the Christian music community these days; give me Mick Jagger’s Never Make a Saint Out of Me over pretty much anything that Carey Landrey (Peeeeeeeeace is waaaaaarbling like a reeeeeeeeeeaver…) has written, any day of the week. That goes double for the blues, which has always been about pouring out one’s pain and struggles; good blues is as much about entertaining the audience as it is about therapy for the singer. There’s not much further to go, after that point, before one ends up again in the arms of the Lord, who desires to ease all human suffering.

So it’s great that Eric Clapton has found a firmer faith in God, and that in the wake of doing so has been able to turn his life away from the hellish pleasures that the rock and roll lifestyle makes all too readily available to those living it.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)