BEST WEAPON AGAINST STDS FOR KIDS? 'NO'.

Byline: Bridget Johnson

SOME were surprised when President Bush, in his State of the Union speech last week, pledged to focus efforts on combating the burgeoning AIDS crisis in the African-American community.

In reality, Bush's eye has been on AIDS prevention for a while, as he's pushed an agenda of abstinence education in schools.

Unfortunately, teaching abstinence is too often written off as a faith-based agenda from the wacko right. But when faced with a matter of life or death and crippling sexually transmitted diseases, can we afford to monkey around with political correctness when instructing a hormonal teenager?

Out of curiosity, I entered the words ``teen STD abstinence'' into a search engine. The first Web site listed in the results taught teens how to use a dental dam for anal-oral sex - detailed, of course, in obnoxious ``teen'' terms that assumed kids had brains the size of peas and engaged in activities not seen even in Playboy.

And while teens are logging on to advice sites such as this, one out of four people infected with HIV this year in the U.S. will be under 21 years old, according to the L.A. County Department of Health Services' Office of AIDS Programs and Policy. In L.A., more than 52,000 people are living with AIDS. One out of five infected with HIV here doesn't know it.

About one out of four sexually active teens in California will get a sexually transmitted disease this year. A 2003 county report said 60 percent of reported chlamydia cases and 46 percent of gonorrhea cases occurred within the 15-24 age range.

I remember sexual-behavior issues from when I was in high school in the early '90s. The kids who got in trouble weren't the students in the Advanced Placement classes, on the student council, competing in band tournaments. I thought about the couple of friends in junior high who were sexually active then, and remembered they dropped out soon into high school. I recalled who among my high school friends were sexually active, and noticed most didn't go to a four-year college, whereas nearly all of my other friends did.

Another common denominator among my sexually active friends in high school was that their parents just assumed they were having sex. The chaste teens feared ruining their futures or disappointing parents if they went beyond first base. Distrust from parents often manifested into an expectation that teens will do wrong if given the chance.

But will there be some kids who will never be swayed by abstinence education? If the smart and ambitious kids are less likely to fool around, should we assume the unmotivated and less intelligent teens will stray off the chaste path? More important, should we give up on those teens - and thereby increase their chances of contracting a deadly disease?

When faced with the statistics, it's disturbing to settle for risk reduction rather than heavily stressing risk elimination. Sending out a teenager with a fistful of condoms is like sending him out with a loaded gun and hoping he doesn't disengage the safety.

It's not pushing a moral or religious agenda to tell teens the honest truth: They need to keep their clothes on, because their lives and futures depend on it. Be frank about sex, and be frank about the dangers.

Abstinence education is not about pushing sex under the rug and hoping it goes away until graduation day. Kids are going to gossip in the misinformation of sex after getting sexuality lessons from the latest bump-'n'-grind songs. I remember a fourth-grade friend sharing on our Catholic school playground the latest sex education learned from her father's porn magazines. Luckily, real sex ed started that same grade at that school.

Considering the public health crisis today, why not take a scared-straight approach with abstinence education? Bring students into the science lab to study pubic-hair lice, aka crabs. Spend not hours, but weeks covering every unpleasant element of every sexually transmitted disease.

Make teens volunteer at an AIDS hospice, or a program that assists AIDS patients with day-to-day living. Let them see the toll the disease takes; let them ponder whether a patient would give anything for one chance to take back the moment of passion that translated into a death sentence. Give teens the weapon to fight AIDS: the word ``no.''