St. Valentine's Day Now Touted As National Condom Day...

Once upon a time, St. Valentines Day commemorated a saint who uplifted the dignity of love and marriage. For the more historical critically minded, St. Valentine's was simply the attempt at Christianizing the pagan fertility ceremonies of Lupercalia. These ceremonies included the sacrificing of a goat (for fertility) and a dog (for purity) to the Goddess Fauna and Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Then boys would run around town slapping women and fields of crops with the strips of the meat to make them more fertile. The Christians, then, "christened" it to bring about the dignity of love and marriage which is centered on Christ.

At any rate, it seems like we've come full circle and the pagans are trying to take the holiday over again. In recent decades, it has descended into simply a sex holiday where chocolates are traded for sex. This used to be done in a subtle way, and we could still fool ourselves into thinking that the holiday maintained it's purity (something even the ancient pagans thought important).

This is hardly the case anymore. Valentine's Day, as the national day of promiscuity, has now reared it's ugly head for all to gaze upon. It has descended to a place lower than the ancient Romans who simply prayed for pure fertility. The campus newspaper, at Central Michigan University, reports in its February 12th edition, that this week of Valentine's Day has been deemed National Condom Week by the American Social Health Association or ASHA with the holiday itself being dubbed National Condom Day.

Central Michigan is doing their part to honor this holy day:

Condom Week will have a wide range of educational events taking place at CMU, including an information backdrop by Health Sciences professor Joseph Inungu on HIV/AIDS and a performance by the Spell Birds, a group from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe.
Isabella County AIDS Council will have 15 panels of the AIDS quilt on display at the Bovee university Center Rotunda from Feb. 15-16.

In the subtle message that Valentine's is for promiscuity, (thus all the condom talk) they fail to mention that the best prevention of S.T.D.'s is abstinence. Their message compares to telling a drunk driver that the best way to prevent an accident is to wear his or her seat belt. What is left out is the idea "don't drive." And abstinence isn't simply a religious idea. In Uganda, they decided to take a different approach to fighting AIDS. They promoted abstinence and faithfulness and they have seen drops in the amount of people affected while other African countries continue to watch it rise.

Why does science spend so much of its efforts to try and help people live in a fashion that shows again and again to be frighteningly risky when they could promote the science of initiatives that work to save people from disease?

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UPDATE: (4:15 PM) The National Catholic Register seems to be on the same page as Seminarians. Coincidence? I think not...looks like we have another subscriber...