I rarely purchase music on a whim, but I certainly did the other day via iTunes when I saw an advertisement for “Dark Was the Night,” a compilation of songs by indie artists. It said the album “profits the Red Hot Organization, an international charity dedicated to raising funds and awareness for HIV and AIDS.”

It went on to say that “Red Hot was founded on the premise that even without a cure, AIDS remains a preventable disease — using music as a great vehicle to raise both money and awareness for it.”

That phrase caught my attention; it is something I hadn’t thoroughly considered in a while: “The premise that even without a cure, AIDS remains a preventable disease.”

Sadly, in our culture, AIDS and other STDs have washed over our minds as an unstoppable calamity that requires a great amount of effort to be chipped away at, and even then, we still feel outmatched.

With similar principle, I think we can dissect abstinence-only sex education. Foxnews.com reported last week that “at least 24 states and the District of Columbia are moving from abstinence instruction to a more comprehensive approach that includes lessons about STD prevention and contraception.”

Acknowledging that teen pregnancies and STDs have been on the rise, sex education is crucial in order to prevent a continual incline toward more and more adolescent sex, meaning more and more unwanted pregnancies, and more and more STDs. Although sex education in school is a good reinforcement, education about sex is channeled through many other venues.

We all know that television, movies, books and the Internet are funnels of influence that sell sex and callous our minds to think that everyone is having sex all the time, and certainly if you love someone, you have to have sex.

But if even schools and families are not promoting abstinence in the most enthusiastic way, then there’s little hope for slowing down the increasingly headstrong train of STD contraction and unwanted pregnancy.

What really is concerning though, is that when defining “abstinence-only sex education,” just “abstinence-only” is mentioned, while the “sex education” part is often ignored.

The only difference between the kind of sex education you would get at most public schools and

abstinence-only sex education should be that the latter will continually reinforce a simple truth — with as many incurable STDs there are, 100 percent of them are absolutely preventable.

Unfortunately, most abstinence-only sex education promoters just merely say, “Just don’t have sex and then you don’t have to worry.” Although true, this is hardly effective.

It is true that sex education does acknowledge abstinence and adolescents are still going to have sex no matter what, but giving up the title of abstinence-only sex education is letting “what everyone is doing” dictate what’s right.

Whether you believe premarital sex is unavoidable and therefore morally acceptable, or whether you’re part of the minority who would oppose that, what can’t be ignored is that premarital sex does have significant consequences.

Even if those engaging in premarital sex do listen to their sex-education teachers and use condoms and by chance don’t get pregnant or contract an STD, there are still emotional repercussions that can be just as harmful and painful to deal with.

The naturalistic approach that has been so efficiently dispersed through American culture that sex is purely natural — “baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals” — has us believing that this is just the way it is.

Reach Houston at hfriend1@asu.edu.