OMG I was at the opening night of that movie, Jurassic Park. I was in college. Some fartknocker had brought his adorable little doll of a toddler girl to the 11pm showing. She had on a pink flounced lace dress and a pink lace headband of the sort parents put on tiny girls who don't have enough hair yet to justify…

Oh I totally hear you. One of these days someone's going to figure out that younger people like the same perks.

This happened to me. I made it all the way to the front desk of one apartment building that looked awesome while apartment hunting one day and kinda wondered why all those really old ladies playing bridge in the front room were staring at me as I pulled up in my purple Miata and wandered in with a Starbucks fruit…

It wouldn't matter what suggestion provoked that "ohhhhh YES" reaction. I'd still do it with a smile on my face.

Too bad the mother's isn't.

My very best wishes to the happy couple, and congratulations on their new life together. I'm so happy they were able to do this.

It can be really complicated. I'm sad about it too, but they seem to think their reasons are valid, so about all one can do is try to support them as they work to change the organization.

I will never ever forget your kindness for answering that question. Thank you. I was dying to know what he was saying. All I understood were the numbers in the countdown!

1. Are you seriously still drilling down on the No True Scotsman? Are you truly that bereft of self-awareness? These kids identify as Christian for the most part. They are in Christian churches. They live as Christians. They go to church and pray and do all that stuff. About the only reason you are accusing them of…

1. Loved the No True Scotsman fallacy: If the kids taking these pledges said they were Christian—and Christian churches and communities are largely the force behind abstinence pledges—then it's not your place to say otherwise or to judge them. PS: It's these very Christian kids who think oral and anal sex is the…

But does the Christian view really make patience easier to consider? By your own admission you couldn't handle the actual practice of abstinence. And it sounds like you've allowed your past choices—voluntary consensual choices, I take it—to take some of the value away from your current relationship. But you still…

Yikes. Decoupling sex from intimate relationships doesn't make it selfish. You know what actually does make sex selfish? When someone takes their pleasure and doesn't care about their partner's pleasure at all. Selfish sex is one-sided. It's treating the other person like a living sex toy and disregarding that…

Thanks for writing back. I'm enjoying where this conversation is going and appreciate you taking the time. I think what you've described is very harmful. Clearly it's not benefiting you at all to torture yourself over your past or to think that you've devalued yourself by making the choices you did. Please let me…

BTW, sorry to double you, truly, but I wanted to add this: You kept saying that abstinence only made sense from a Christian perspective. That is not true. Abstinence makes sense for anybody who wants to make a conscious decision not to have sex. Some people do make that decision from a place in their hearts that is…

By the way, that bit about black people? That's straight out of the wingdoodliest segment of super-duper-fundie Dominionist Christian theology. There's a shockingly strong line between ultra-racist white supremacists and modern right-wing Christian thinking. No kidding, there are white dudes writing tracts about how…

Exactly. We need to quit pushing contraceptive methods with super-high rates of failure and start addressing methods that actually work.

I am genuinely sorry that you are allowing your previous sexual experience to damage your current relationship with your wife. I'm not mocking you. I'm very sorry to hear that this perverse mode of thinking has actually harmed you. I was once Christian, so I know how the thinking goes: that your sexual past actually…

I see. So the real problem is that you are unaware of the body of research around abstinence education then. That's okay, I get it. A lot of people don't realize that no, actually, there is not a single bit of evidence that preaching abstinence at young people actually gets them to change their behaviors; by the time…

In my case, that is exactly and precisely what this Catholic acquaintance I mentioned was saying: that abstinence made someone immune to both of those dangers, and that if a person wished to avoid those things, then that person needed to be abstinent because then those things couldn't possibly happen. Believe me, I…

Guessing she was more than a little pissed off that the free babysitting train had pulled out of the station.