By Priscilla Pardini

A year and a half after federal legislation allocating $250 million for abstinence-only sexuality education, the vast majority of Americans know little, if anything, about the law. And they know even less about its potentially disastrous effects.

The legislation throws the full weight of the federal government behind programs that teach that abstinence is the "only certain way" to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, that the expected standard of human sexual activity is "a monogamous relationship within the context of marriage," and that sex outside of marriage is likely to be "psychologically and physically harmful." States agreeing to teach abstinence can receive annual allocations of $78,526 to $4.9 million over the next five years.

Not that there's anything wrong with abstinence. In fact, if there is anything everyone agrees on when it comes to the highly charged subject of sex education, it is that abstinence is an appropriate choice for teenagers.

There's just one problem -- most adolescents begin having intercourse in their mid-to-late teens, roughly eight years before they marry.