A recent online New York Times interview shows that college students understand the harms associated with smoking. But the article also offers a glimpse of mental schizophrenia when it comes to college students and risky behavior.

While the article shows these students recognize the dangers of smoking, it also reveals that almost none understand the dangers of sexual promiscuity. When it comes to smoking, one student “cannot . . . fathom why someone could—in the face of all the medical evidence that smoking literally kills—take up this habit.” But when it comes to sex, that same student admits wanting to sleep with 14 people before marriage.

It is not surprising that young people want to have sex: that desire has been around forever. Instead, it is disturbing that these students do not recognize how much more dangerous sexual promiscuity can be than smoking.

Smoking, no doubt, has its horrible effects. But whereas one must be exposed to countless numbers of cigarettes over an extended period of time to feel their effects, one must only sleep with the wrong person once to be exposed to STDs like HIV, AIDS (categorized by many as an epidemic), hepatitis, and HPV (which can lead to cervical cancer).

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1 in 4 women between the ages of 14 and 19 have an STD. Not to mention that sex may, even despite our best efforts, actually produce what God intended it to—a baby. The lust for pleasure, it seems, skews the perception of risks.

While some may applaud the students’ aversion to smoking, these people, like the students, overlook a simple, important point: one or two cigarettes cannot change your life forever; one or two one night stands can.

Actress (Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice) and Planned Parenthood board member Kate Walsh appeared on CBS’s “The Early Show” to talk about sex education for teens: “Abstinence is one aspect of sex education, but it is not the complete aspect. And to expect, I think, everybody to remain abstinent is just—it’s like asking them not to grow. It’s like we don’t ask people to not try out for sports.” Thank goodness she just plays a doctor on TV. … See the clip here.

Why do we see an “epidemic of breakups” and why does romance die? Relevant Church in Ybor City, Fla., says it has the answer: “People are not having enough sex.”

That’s why the “openly edgy” church is issuing a 30 Day Sex Challenge, daring married couples to do it every day for 30 days and challenging singles to abstain for 30 days. Challenge-takers will record their impressions, sexual encounters or abstentions in journals. They can share their thoughts on a blog that will launch when the challenge begins: February 17, 2008.

The objectives: Challenge the assumption that God frowns on sex, improve Christians’ sex lives and strengthen relationships. The theory: Increasing intimacy will increase communication. The reactions: visceral, and varied.

Pastor Paul Wirth told Fox News, “Our married people are far more fearful than our single people.” St. Petersburg Times says one’s wife’s initial reaction — “Oh – okay” — was tepid compared to her husband’s. “Of course, all the guys say it’s genius,” Wirth reports. “The married women think we’re out of our minds.”

Cary McMullen from TheLedger.com wonders, “Are they going to sell Viagra in the lobby? … Thirty days in a row could kill a guy at my age.” CPBlotter.com mocks the Challenge blog as “homegrown porn,” calls participants “Perverts for Christ,” and deems the whole idea “creepy.” A Little Leaven puts the Challenge in its Museum of Idolatry and takes a moral tone: “Is this why Jesus came to earth, sweat drops of blood, was scourged, nailed to a cross, hung naked and bleeding with a crown of thorns on His head and died?”

Maybe it’s one reason. Wirth told First Coast News, “I don’t think sex was created in the back alleys of the porn industry. I really think God is the one who designed it and it’s a beautiful thing and God wants us to enjoy it.”

American Idol has featured more than appalling singers and future stars this season. It’s also become a platform for abstinence advocates.

First, a diminutive social worker, Milo Turk, dedicated his original song, “No Sex Allowed,” to Simon Cowell. Turk didn’t make it to Hollywood, but Amy Catherine Flynn did. Flynn, a panelist for Students Teaching and Respecting Sexuality, gave a brief, inarticulate speech on abstinence. Bruce Dickson, 19, talked about his promise not to kiss a girl until his wedding day and showed a key-and-heart necklace he shared with his dad.

Flynn and Dickson prompted different reactions. Randy and Paula cooed over Flynn and Simon waited until she left to mutter, “One week in L.A., it’ll all change.” Dickson drew more mockery. Randy advised Dickson to kiss some girls and Ryan Seacrest’s voice-over said, “Maybe if Bruce does come back next year, he’ll return less boy and more man.”

Daniel Radosh of the Huffington Post said it’s because Dickson didn’t fit the stereotype of male sexuality: “Dickson is a guy, and while it’s still acceptably feminine for girls to be demure, boys are “supposed” to be sexually aggressive. There’s something weird about one who’s not.” Radosh said the abstinence movement reflects this idea, focusing its efforts more on girls than boys and basing its message on the “stereotype of aggressive boys.”

Jimmy Hester, coordinator for True Love Waits, told WoW that he sees just as many boys as girls taking abstinence pledges and that girls are “just as responsible for creating sexual activity and sexual opportunity as boys.” He added that he knows a 300-pound football player who wears a True Love Waits ring and would take issue with the assertion that it makes him less manly.

Is there some basis for the cynicism Simon showed? WORLD’s Gene Edward Veith cites studies that say abstinence pledges only delay sex for an average of 18 months, and 88 percent of pledgers eventually give up the pledge altogether.

Hester said the second study took a sample too small to make an accurate judgment. He relies more on statistics that find sexual activity and sexually transmitted diseases decreasing over the last decade.

Taking the pledge alone is not effective, Hester said: “I tell the students all the time there’s nothing magic about signing that card.” Hester said “strong adult support” (like the kind Dickson gets from his dad) is key: “When there are significant adults in the lives of the teenagers, the teenager will tend to live out those views and practice those views.”

…you ain’t see nothing yet. Check out this Culture and Media Institute review of the CBS program Cold Case:

When’s the last time your local Christian youth group stoned somebody to death?…In the September 30 episode of the CBS forensics show, the devoutly religious teens in an abstinence club turn out to be sexually active hypocrites who murder one of their own members - by stoning her, as the Bible teaches - to keep their sins secret.  Their youth pastor encourages one girl to describe her impure dreams to him, and masturbates while listening.

In a ham-handed attempt to influence this fall’s Congressional debate on abstinence education programs, the show also depicts abstinence-only education as useless, if not actively harmful.   

The episode centers on the unsolved 1998 murder of Carrie Swett, a promiscuous 15-year-old girl.   New clues lead the detectives in the Philadelphia homicide unit to reopen the case. Shortly before her death Carrie joins Hearts Wait, an abstinence club…

Cue fearmongering and hysteria.

It gets worse. Seriously. Check out the rest of the review here. I have known of youth pastors tossed for having sex with their charges. But Cold Case suggests that the very idea of abstinence before marriage — a worthy, healthy ideal – is not only Ungood, but so Ungood as to spawn a murderous coven. Now: as a community, WMB may have the Internet’s highest concentration of youth-group/abstinence program experience and expertise. How far beyond reality does this Cold Case episode go to demonize Christians and their values?