So we’re back to the eternal debate over sex education. We can’t escape the media’s fascination with such refined topics as condoms, illegitimacy, and abstinence education. This week it was the story about Texas’ having spent $17 million enjoining students not to “do it,” while 52.9 percent of 9th through 12th graders did it anyway. The figure compares with 47.8 percent nationally.

Cheerleaders for the prophylactic approach to pregnancy control wag their heads wisely. Of course! Abstinence Ed — the counsel to keep from premarital sexual activity — gets you only so far in These Modern Times. Better, supposedly, to teach protection and let it go.

That still-conservative Texas doesn’t buy officially into this line of reasoning drives pro-condomites to distraction.

Texas law requires public schools that offer Sex Ed to focus the presentation on the need for non-sexual contact before marriage. It’s OK to mention condoms — a word not in general discourse until about 20 years ago — but chiefly by way of showing their non-dependability as pregnancy-prevention devices. Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston), a co-author of the Sex Ed legislation now in force, says he fears there’s too much emphasis on abstinence. Why, out in California, say others, teachers equipped with bananas may legally demonstrate condom use! Poor Texas, where the Puritans and blue-noses roam, depriving modern kids of basic knowledge they could appropriate to general benefit.

Poor Texas, nothing! About all the Legislature — including Rep. Garnet Coleman — has done in providing for emphasis on abstinence from sex is undertake to remind young people that gratification isn’t the be-all and end-all of existence. Which is the least you might expect of a governmental body charged with the oversight of education.

You don’t educate people by telling them, in essence, there aren’t any rules you have to follow any more, our culture having done away with silly restrictions on human desire. You educate people, rather, by reminding them not just of opportunities and possibilities but of limitations known and understood throughout the entirety of civilization. Such as the one that says — against scoffing and railing and heckling — that the relationship between man and woman is of a magnitude and urgency so large as to falter and suffer when reduced to a matter of momentary gratification.

Everybody with a pulse and at least one functioning brain cell knows the human track record with respect to sexual temptation. No one thinks reasoned repetition of the arguments against premarital sex will miraculously persuade all hot-blooded youth of the need, at crucial instances, for a cold shower. No way.

You don’t try, though? You ridicule or write off the very attempt as stupid, prissy, and backwards? You cave in to the call of the condom? And you call it “education”?

It’s anything but education. It’s dereliction, and don’t let the Austin American-Statesman, or the Texas Observer, or Planned Parenthood, or any other entity associated with the cause of individual autonomy tell you differently. That ole dog simply and plainly won’t hunt.

The State of Texas is right to pursue abstinence education inasmuch as no good is accomplished by signaling citizens of their right to obey such laws as they choose to obey. Which is pretty much the thrust of Sex Ed, a la Planned Parenthood.

The condom cultists say, abstinence, blah, blah, might work here and there, won’t work most of the time, so pay attention, class, this marvelous piece of prophylactic engineering is called a condom, and to use it, you simply…

Reductionist rubbish is the kindest name for this kind of non-teaching — as indeed younger students seem to know seem to fathom. Up to the ninth grade, the statistics say, they sort of get it. Then sexual awakening occurs. They lose it.

The lesson here? Surely it’s to plumb a little deeper the sources of youthful awe for the true and figure out what it takes to make that sense of awe last longer than sixth period on the last day of eighth grade.

A sensible, not to say a brave, government understands this priority and presses it. The kind of government that doesn’t understand the trouble it lays up for the future by winking at moral defiance is — brave might be the unlikeliest description.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry says of Abstinence Ed that the Governor “is comfortable with,” and “supports,” it. That’s more like it.

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