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An interesting quote from The Federalist Patriot (a conservative journal):

"[N]o big deal. By definition, that's what a 'major social norm' is: no big deal. But in fact it is a big deal—whether the grown-ups in their lives are prepared to say so or not—when kids too young to lawfully buy a pack of cigarettes are routinely engaging in sexual activity that most of them don't yet have the maturity or understanding to handle. In its potential to inflict internal damage or cause lasting pain, sex far surpasses tobacco. But while kids are warned repeatedly and stridently about the dangers of smoking, school-age sex is widely regarded as inevitable. The same people who enforce 'zero-tolerance' strictures when it comes to guns and knives push a very different message when it comes to sex: Keep it 'safe' and legal, and you'll hear no complaints from us... Shouldn't those charged with the education of teenagers be pushing back against the relentless sexualization of the culture instead of knuckling under to it? With sex bombarding them everywhere they turn, don't kids need more than ever to be taught that sex is for grown-ups?... There is something awfully sad and strange about a culture in which teenage sex is condoned so long as it is 'safe,' while teenage smoking is denounced as categorically wrong. Sex has become a mere issue of health and the law, while morality is reserved for tobacco." —Jeff Jacoby

Does he have a point? If not, why not?

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Here is my issue with it. The thing that has changed in our society is not so much that children are having sex, but that they are being more upfront about it. I personally know of family members of mine who are in their late 60's, and have been married for 50 years...due to a hushed-up, unwanted pregnancy.

Also...something that has changed is that people are getting married later in life than ever before, so the prospect of telling a child that he must abstain until marriage is no longer the difference between waiting from ages 17 to 22, but is the difference between ages 17 to 30.

Frankly, I am a 26-year-old who was raised in a very fundamental Christian environment. Despite being attractive and personable, I made the decision to wait until marriage to have sex. It is only now, after watching my brother's first marriage collapse in part because he wanted to get married only to have sex, and because I now feel like an outcast, that I regret my decision to wait.

I am putting myself at risk for flames, insults, whatever for admitting that I am still a virgin, and not because I can't get a girl. The constant drumming of "abstain, abstain" has certainly done its job...I have passed up opportunities to have sex before...but given that I spend long months without any sort of physical interaction, am consistently frustrated, feel like a freak, and generally have to constantly fight off feelings of perversion and inadequacy, I now wonder if the strategy of my upbringing was the right one.