For some reason, the Las Vegas Police decided that it was their business to instruct young girls not to ever ever have sex until they are married. Otherwise, they will end up as prostitutes, drug addicts and dead people. So, the police (yes, the police!) hosted a 'Choose Purity' event over the weekend, in which Officer Regina Coward, president of the Nevada Black Police Association, told girls that promiscuity leads to sexual assault, gang activity, and drugs. According to the Las Vegas Sun, Officer Coward was asked by her church, Victory Outreach Church, to set up an event emphasizing abstinence. She really went all out, even including a demonstration with a body bag (to drive home that point about premarital sex leading to death.)

According to the Sun, about 125 people attended the event and "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."

So don't have sex girls. Capiche?

The Sun's account:

Wide-eyed youngsters watched as two girls gave dramatic performances told from the perspective of one girl who had died after abusing diet pills and one who had died after contracting a sexually transmitted disease as a prostitute. The monologues concluded with each girl getting on a gurney and into a body bag.

Coward expressed particular pride in these Toe Tag Monologues, saying that is really happening.

One dissenting voice in the room was Laura Deitsch, who was a health educator for a local reproductive health organization for more than a dozen years. She 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.”

It also wasn't clear that all the speakers meant to make an explicit connection between, say sex trafficking, which is horrible, and premarital sex, which is pretty normal.

“I’m not speaking as a perspective from purity and all that,” Gwendolyn “Lou" Pascoe, director of the Southern Nevada Human Trafficking Task Force, who spoke about sex trafficking told the Sun. Apparently, she just welcomes any opportunity to talk about the dangers of sex trafficking.

But whether the speakers meant to make the connection or not, Coward is very serious about linking abstinence with crime prevention. She told a reporter she became pregnant when she was 16, and that she wonders if her life would be different if she had been taught she could say 'no.'

But Deitsch wondered whether seeing officers in Metro polo shirts, with guns holstered, in this context was confusing for children.

“I wonder if anybody came away with the idea that premarital sex is criminal,” she told the Sun.