This Saturday, the Las Vegas Metro Police helped sponsor a "Choose Purity" event targeted at young girls. Its message was pretty simple: if you have sexual intercourse before signing some legal documents binding you to another human, you risk getting sucked into the dark world of drugs, gangs and sex trafficking. Oh, and you might die. Of course.


According to the Las Vegas Sun, the Metro Police co-sponsored the event with a local church. About 125 parents and children attended; they were told that having sex before marriage could unleash a litany of horrors upon previously innocent young women:

The room of about 125 parents and children watched recorded interviews with a pimp and prostitutes, learned modern-day slavery exists in the form of the sex trade, and saw grisly images of people who'd suffered at the hands of hard drugs — such as a woman who'd lost limbs in a methamphetamine lab explosion and a man who'd had his face partially gnawed off by a meth user.


Thank goddess these brave state government employees are here to educate the youth on that all-too-often undiscussed connection between Teen Sex and drug-induced cannibalism! It's just shocking how many instances of face-eating annually are caused by unmarried people touching their genitals together.

The assembled children and parents also watched two girls deliver dramatic monologues about dying — one from abusing diet pills and one from contracting an STD after becoming a prostitute. Each girl ended her speech by getting into body bag on a gurney.

What does any of this have to do with abstinence? Uh, well, pretty much nothing. As Laura Deitsch, a health educator who attended the event, told the Sun: "Drugs are real; sex trafficking is real. I don't know what is real about linking purity with those things. It was a hodgepodge of unrelated fear mongering."According to the Sun report, even though the theme of the event was "Choose Purity," there was little effort made to connect any of the assorted horrors and doom proclamations back to the value of abstinence. This may have been intentional — after all, there's no need to be logical when your goal is to whip up unsubstantiated and irrational panic.

Obviously, there's no correlation between having sex before marriage and dying of diet pill addiction (????) or losing limbs in a meth lab explosion (seriously, WHAT). There is a connection between sex and contracting an STD, though, which is precisely why effective sex education is so important. Students who take virginity pledges aren't any less likely to have premarital sex, but they areless likely to use protection. Maybe someone should compose a monologue about abstinence-only education that ends with her crawling into a body bag! Ha ha, just kidding, that would be psychotic.


Image via Africa Studios/Shutterstock.