Abstinence is the way to go

THE EDITOR: Permit me the occasion to congratulate Professor Courtney Bartholomew on the speech given at the Tobago Youth Festival on Friday January 16, 2004 published in Newsday Thursday January 22, 2004. I too was fortunate to have my Primary Education at Nelson Street Boys’ RC School under the late Mr Arthur Roberts, where discipline included a stout police cane, on the backs of all the boys in the back-row; when one of our number was caught talking during class. I was privileged to associate with the Tobagonian Scholars who were products of the British Education System, and they did Tobago proud.

The facility with which we as a people have allowed standards to disappear is frightening. Our ability to ape other nations bad-manners is most alarming. If only a million Trinbagonians were able to read and digest Prof Bartholomew’s speech, the immorality, pornography, lewdness and vulgarity that permeate our lives in and out of home will be greatly reduced. What would Jesus Christ have us preach to our children? Abstinence, abstinence, abstinence until you get married. Why is the Church not shouting this from their steeples? In Columbia, the silver ring thing is in town. It is a sexual abstinence programme that seeks to persuade teenage America that no sex before marriage is the way to go. The teens exchange $12 for a silver ring and a bible. The ring is a symbol of the pledge that they will have made: to remain sexually pure until marriage. We can ape this programme to encompass all unwedded persons, and so assist in reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS and this will have a multiplier effect over the years, to resist temptation and avoid the disaster of disease- abstinence.

PERNEL WELSH
Bengal Street
St James