Hm. That’s a complex question. Let me break it down for you.

Premarital sex: Nothing against it. I think that marriage is a pretty arbitrary thing. Since we’re regularly denying it to people for all sorts of reasons, and marriages break up all the time, and a lot of people don’t even want to get married, then why wait til then to be sexually intimate with someone? It doesn’t make sex or marriage less special. It just stops using a marker that doesn’t mean what it used to.

Teenagers and sex: I think everybody has a “right” circumstance for their first time. And nobody can really tell you what that is.  I think parents and teachers forget how active they were when they were teens and how much they grew up, learning from those experiences. It’s part of growing up, no doubt. The problem comes when you deal with too much, too fast. Most adults are afraid the teens they care about are going to become turbo sluts and get into a lot of trouble. Because sex has consequences. Even if you duck the obvious ones (pregnancy, STDs, Stage 5 clingers, players), there is still a lot of mojo in that act. It can be a powerful big deal to have sex with someone. And if you don’t value it, it will stop being valuable and fufilling to you.

Underage Drinking: Kind of like sex, it’s something we’ve almost all done. But it’s something that should be resisted. It SHOULD be hard and weird and tricky for people to drink while underage. It should be a rare thing that happens once or twice before college. Because just like too much sex, it can get you into trouble. It shouldn’t be something that gets too casual and too frequent.

Hope all that makes sense.