S.Z. hasn’t posted for the last three days, which wouldn’t be weird for most blogs, but S.Z. hasn’t skipped three straight days since… well, ever. So the staff here at Sadly, No! hope she’s OK. (Note to Yosef: don’t let what I said in WO’C’s comments get you down- with a little more training, I’m sure you’ll make a fine smell-hound.)

In tribute to S.Z., here’s a small Townhall Review (note: “Townhall Review” is trademark and copyright World O’ Crap Productions).

Spring is in the air, and the pundits at Townhall have sex on their minds. (Well actually, they have abstaining from sex on their minds.) Let’s start off with Armstrong Williams and his column, fittingly titled “Sex”:

One of the greatest challenges in my life is the struggle to abstain from premarital sex. It is not easy.

Especially if you’re Armstrong Williams and Hemlock Echo keeps sending you alluring photos of himself wearing nothing but a greasy thong.

Armstrong goes on to list reasons premarital sex is bad. Miraculously, none of them have anything to do with the No Child Left Behind Act. Then he concludes with a bizarre story (emphasis added):

For all of these reasons, sex is not something to be treated casually, because it could have unintended consequences. Or, as Rev. Donald D Robinson, former Director of the D.C. Mayor’s office on religious affairs, observed during a sermon, “It is God’s will that they abstain from sexual activity until they are married.” In case anyone missed the point, Robinson took a pack of gum from his pocket and gave everyone in the front row a stick. About 25 minutes later, he returned to the topic of the gum. When participants remarked that the flavor is fading, Robinson offered to share his stick.

Uuuuh, didn’t the Catholic church get in trouble for antics like this?

Before they could respond, he plucked the gooey wad from his mouth and held it out like precious offering. The would-be recipients lurched back in disgust. The point, explains Robinson: “If you are prematurely sexually active, by the time you have become married, you’re like a chewed up piece of gum?all of your flavor, freshness and sweetness is gone.”

So having premarital sex is like chewing on used gum- it’s unpleasant, flavorless and sticky. (Of course, you could always go out and buy a fresh pack, but then you’d get a reputation as a gum whore, and nobody wants that. And besides, you can only deflower Trident so many times before you get bored.)

Next up, we have Kathleen Parker, who says that sex education makes sex seem boring and dull, so we shouldn’t bother teaching it at all (unless we talk about how bad it is outside of marriage):

Just reading the words “teen sex” sends me rocketing through wormholes of ennui.

Hmmm, it sounds like Kathleen’s been taking writing lessons from Kaye Grogan.

I mean, really. Can’t they just go outside and play? Not just the kids, but the grown-ups who refuse to leave them alone.

Ooo, ooo! A play-date! She asked me out on a play-date!

Perhaps this is just the wife in me talking, but surely no one thinks about sex as constantly as sex educators assume kids do. (If you disagree, please resist the urge to share.)

What, you don’t wanna hear about the Midget Porn I’m starring in?

When it comes to the riveting issue of how we should teach kids to practice sex – safely, or not at all, or some combo thereof – it seems it’s the adults who are consumed with sex, projecting their own obsession onto children, who have been denied the right not to know.

What was for other generations a mysterious and wondrous thing is now the equivalent of learning to change a tire in driver’s ed. Only bureaucrats – and the world’s increasingly wealthy condom vendors – could manage to make sex boring.

So the next time sex with your spouse is less than satisfying, be sure to blame it on the fat cats who run Big Prophylactic.

The latest addition to our nation’s growing cognitive dissonance is a new study from Yale and Columbia universities that produced this nugget: Kids who pledge abstinence are more likely to have unsafe sex (when they finally give into the relentless societal pressure to canoodle).

Researchers report following 12,000 students in grades 7 through 12 for six years. They found that when those who had promised sexual abstinence did fall from grace, they were more likely not to use condoms than other kids. Ta-dum. Get it? If you want your kids to practice safe sex, better keep them away from those wacky abstinence programs.

Will do. I don’t want them learning that you can contract AIDS from someone else’s tears either.

Perhaps giving up abstinence for a roll in the hay is like abdicating Atkins and scarfing several supersized orders of fries. Whatever the other confounding factors, the message seems clear: abstinence bad, condoms good. The subtext, of course, is that America’s children can’t control themselves, they must have sex, and therefore, they have to learn the nitty-gritty of the down ‘n’ dirty. Whether they want to or not.

No, Kathleen, that’s not the subtext. The subtext is that if people choose to have sex at some point in the future, they should know what the hell they’re doing. The same goes for teaching people about responsible alcohol use- drinking may not be the healthiest pastime, but if someone chooses to drink, you don’t want them chugging down a bottle of vodka and then trying to drive to White Castle.

One does not have to be a hung-up, sexually repressed prude to feel nauseated by the triumph of Technos over Eros.

No, but it does mean one has far too much free time on one’s hands.

Recognizing that there’s nothing new under the sun – and that sex is both pleasurable and a necessary human drive – could we nevertheless stop panting long enough to ask whether any of this is sane?

Hmm, give me a minute to think it over…

…

…OK, I’m back. Kathleen, you’re nuts.

There are a hundred different arguments with the latest-breaking stats to match both for and against sex ed in school, but undergirding all the studies, curricula and rhetoric is another assumption that deserves closer scrutiny.

That is, that parents can’t do a proper job of teaching their children values, morals and what we used to call the Birds ‘n’ the Bees, and that government bureaucrats are the last word on human intimacy.

Our children should fire us for dereliction of duty.

Kathleen, on behalf of children everywhere: you’re fired.

Finally, there’s Ben Shapiro. Ben needs no introduction, since everything he writes wins the official Sadly, No! Seal of Lame:

Meanwhile, some 160 miles away, students at Princeton University were cleaning up after a weekend of cross-dressing fun. On April 16, Princeton played host to the All-Ivy Drag Competition. Competitors were judged based on their performances, costumes, entertainment value and talent.

Oh no! What kind of vile degeneracy are they peddling on our campuses?! I haven’t seen such a blatant display of debauchery since these perverts were on television:

Acts included two drag queens (from Columbia and Penn) stripping to their underwear and revealing their masculinity; Berkeley College male “Tina Broom” lip-synching “Proud Mary”; and two Yale students, king and queen, dancing to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” One of the competition judges was Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, who proclaimed after watching the lavishly festooned transvestites cavorting around the stage, “Everyone’s a winner. There are no losers.”

“Then she added, ‘Unless you’re Ben Shapiro.'”

Sadly, we now live in a world where differences between the sexes are the object of unrelenting attack, whether from political demagogues or campus deconstructionists.

It sounds like Ben’s worried that the drag queens are going to bend him over and make him submit to an “unrelenting attack” of their own.

The campaign to paint masculinity and femininity as social constructs is in full swing on college campuses. The only difference between Princeton and the Democrats in the Senate is that at Princeton, students and administrators don’t have to couch their idiocy in a cloak of quasi-rationality. So instead, the president of Princeton University may sit in open approval of cross-dressing, the Daily Princetonian may refer to men as “she” and women as “he” and drag queen Rachman Blake (Class of ’07) may explain that he gets his biggest thrill “when people say, ‘You’re better off as a woman than as a man.'”

People say the same thing to Ben all the time, but he isn’t as thrilled about it as Mr. Blake.

I used to think social liberals wanted to celebrate diversity. Now it’s clear social liberals want to obscure all distinctions between men and women so that all choices, sexual and behavioral, are equal. Just call it the “melting pot of gender.” Or the melting down of America.

Yeah forget bin Laden- here’s the REAL threat to America’s future: