Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala was quoted in a recent edition of Seventeen Magazine as saying there shouldn't be hard and fast rules about premarital sex and that it's not always bad, provided it's safe. She claims she was misquoted. Of course, she couldn't stand by a comment like that, not in the face of passionate conservative criticism. Conservatives, by the way, believe that people should stay virgins all there lives and only have sex to procreate. Well, that's what they act like -- as if they hate sex.

I hope Shalala wasn't misquoted (she probably wasn't), and I wish she'd stand behind it. There is nothing wrong with teen or premarital sex, as long as everything's consensual. I lost my virginity at 15 to my high school sweetheart who was 16 and not a virgin, and we had a wonderful time. Lot's of people at my high school had se and had wonderful times. I knew one girl who got pregnant and had the baby which she is now loving and raising -- last time I talked with her she was glad it happened, it was never treated as a tragedy. I heard a few rumors about abortions, but who can really say? It was high school, people lied, stories got exaggerated.

What I can't say, given my own past, is that teen sex is wrong. I had my first rush of truly intense feeling for another person, a first sense of closeness with another being, a taste of real love. All in all, I'd say I'm better for having fallen in love young.

Premarital sex is a random label. It's not necessarily different than marital sex. Prohibitions against this activity just the expressions of religious morality imposed on people who haven't always chosen to be religious. Look, if you believe your god will be mad at you for this, don't do it. By all means, it's not worth the worry. But if your god doesn't care, or if you don't have a God, by all means, play. Just be safe.

We need to teach people about safe sex. Abstinence is stupid because it teaches people that sex is somehow dangerous, when it usually isn't, it implies all sorts of nasty consequences which aren't there. So, when someone takes the plunge (so to speak) and realizes that sex is more often good than bad, it seems they've been lied to and they start to wonder what else their parents and teachers have fibbed about. It actually works this way with marijuana, which is why it's really a gateway drug -- we tell kids it's so horrible, then they go to college and they try it and realize it's not horrible at all. So they figure they were also lied to about heroin... To build up unfounded fears to control people is to beg for those fears to be disproven, and for people to head naively out of control.

If we taught safe sex, meanwhile, and taught it well, we could avoid the nasty consequences of unwanted pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and drunken date rapes. If you start the conversation with "premarital sex is immoral" then you negate the more important "but what do I do if I want to have safely" line of talk. The same, of course, applies to our narcotics laws.

As society becomes more liberated we need to shed our old moral notions and deal with reality. I could not have been convinced to hang on to my virginity when I was in high school, and I'm glad no one tried because I still cherish the romance she and I shared. God didn't smite me and I wasn't left unhealthy, or as a father working in McDonald's and yeah, I had some advantages that probably helped make it all work out, but that's my point -- we should be helping people to enjoy life safely, not trying to limit their behavior.

In high school Michael Maiello pretended he was still a virgin because he didn't want to miss out on "we'll never get laid" jokes with his friends.