On the other hand, this means a bumper crop of liberal voters 18 years from now...

Last year, Wisconsin politics returned to a much-loved subject on the right, probably the thing the current GOP loves second-best (next to making sure that every nutjob in the state carries a gun secretly): Making sure kids get pregnant and diseased.

They don't say it that way, of course: The politicians who want kids to get pregnant or sick as quickly as possible don't come right out and tell people that. Instead, they say something like:

"We want to promote abstinence-only education," which, let's face it, is the same thing as telling kids to get pregnant.

The usual argument made by people who support early pregnancies among teens is that if you tell teens how to have safe sex, you're giving them the green light to have sex. It's funny, though: sex is the only area where people (conservatives, so I'm using the term people loosely) argue that telling someone how to be safe creates the urge to do that thing.

That is: Conservatives say telling someone if you're going to have sex, be safe makes kids more likely to be safe.

But wouldn't that hold true for everything kids want to do? Nobody says "if we tell Sally to wear her seatbelt, it will only encourage her to drive. We'd better never mention seatbelts around her." They don't say that because it would be ridiculous: Sally's going to want to drive no matter what; you might as well make sure she's belted in.

That's why I made sure to tell our kids about condoms and why they should use them: I'm a responsible parent who knows that his kids are someday going to have sex. I'd prefer if they wait until never to do that, but I'm a realist and I know that teens want to have sex, and so I made sure they were prepared.

Teens and young adults go to parties. They go on spring break. They live in dorms where the opposite sex is walking around in towels. They live, in short, in a smorgasbord of sex opportunities and so I make sure they know how to be healthy about all that temptation.

And it's easier than ever to stay safe: You can order condoms online, from sites like that link goes to, and they'll be delivered discreetly and quickly, so you don't have to go to the corner store and get them, and you'll never have to be without them.

Abstinence is fine, in the abstract. But people aren't abstract. So they ought to be smarter about sex, and use condoms to avoid pregnancies and disease.