Contraceptive for Manning, not contraceptive for all

I tried finding reasons why he would give such ground breaking advice but the only thing I could come up with is that people who look at television until they fall asleep, may actually fall asleep earlier, wake up less tired and have more time to prepare meals for their family.

My problem is that most TV shows encourage people to have sex. If the Prime Minister really wants to use the television as a form of family planning I suggest he replace those long, boring, programmes with ministers walking around shaking hands with citizens (who only see them around election time), cutting ribbons and digging the earth with programmes that encourage people to practice safer sex. Why not have the powers that be create a programme that would educate the public on proper and safe sex methods? Abstinence can also be discussed and promoted in this way.

Believe it or not I hear teens today speaking about using things like "penny-cool" wrappers and foil. Things I didn’t even think could be used as contraceptive are being used.

Why? Because they are afraid to walk into a pharmacy and ask for "a safer form of protection."

Over and over people talk about the horror stories of going into a pharmacy to purchase things like condoms, pregnancy testing kits and even feminine napkins.

For some strange reason people in this country like to act as though sex and menstruation are sins. They act as if it is not a normal part of life and are forbidden to speak about it.

While I agree fully with promoting abstinence and I agree that people should not have sex outside of marriage, I despise the stigma that is attached to normal life, by which I mean young people who insist on sex.

Is it not better for young people who choose to have sex to be able to walk into a pharmacy and buy a condom rather than engage in unprotected sex?

TV is not a contraceptive. Never has been and never will be.

If we want to use television for this purpose, we have to stop almost every programme that now comes into our homes and replace it with programmes that show people how to have safe sex.

I doubt, however, that this would be acceptable to our rights as human beings.

It may of course be easy for Mr Manning to watch television until he falls asleep, but it is definitely not the case for ordinary, normal people, who make up the population. He has to come up with a better plan, don’t you think?