From a reader:

Look, I don’t advocate parents letting teens sleep together in their house. But two people in their “late teens” in a loving relationship sleeping together and using birth control ins’t exactly analogous to using heorin with clean needles either. And with the possible exeption of advising New Orleans public planners I see no reason to pay a great deal of attention to what the Dutch think about anything in particular. Who cares what they think about teen sex ? Do they care what we think ? I’m betting no.

Me: This is fair. And I largely agree with the “Who cares about the Dutch?” sentiment. I wasn’t the one who said that the Dutch should be our North Star, that was the academic at U Mass. But I do think dogma has its role. A society that starts saying that this sort of thing is perfectly fine, even advisable, doesn’t stop there. As WFB once said, a society that spends its time debating whether to privatize lighthouses won’t spend a lot of time contemplating socializing medicine. A society that spends a lot of time debating when to allow unmarried kids to have sex in their parents’ homes isn’t going to spend a lot of time talking about how to instill traditional notions of morality.

Yes, I understand that there’s a serious argument that the ship of traditional morality has sailed and is never coming back. And, that’s probably true in the sense that we’ll never restore some halcyon past that never existed in the first place. But I think most readers understand where I was coming from on this: the either/or approach is wrong because teenagers are not entirely immune to moral appeals and parents shouldn’t abdicate their responsibilities to set down moral guidlines beyond those laid out by mythological Dutch parents or eggheads at the University of Massachusetts. What works for one teenager may not work for another. But a blanket rule of moral laxity when it comes to sexual activity and teens seems like a recipe for even more problems.

Last, as several readers point out, I could have used a better analogy than heroin, like letting kids drink alcohol at home so they don’t do it away from adult supervision. I agree that would be a better analogy if I was really looking to make a serious analogy rather than be sarcastic. But sarcasm has its place, no?