If Virginia is for Lovers...

Then Maryland is for people who are confused about sex. On the drive down to Shannon’s on Wednesday, Mom and I passed a billboard in Maryland that irritated us both. It pronounced (without evidence or a source clearly sited, because who can gather that type of detailed info at 65 MPH?) that: “Children of married parents do better in school.” Now, given that my parents are divorced and both my sisters and I held our own quite comfortably in school, we were put off by this obviously “traditional family” propaganda. But it was just one silly billboard and we forgot about it rather quickly.

Until, that is, our drive home. In a spirit of adventure, Mom’s GPS took us a completely different route on the trip home, so we were treated to a whole new set of right wing advertising. The first proclaimed “Abstinence always works.” This, despite years of failed abstinence-only education under the Bush administration proving pretty unequivocally that, no, abstinence doesn’t always work. You know what usually does work? Condoms. But whatever: Maryland’s not too worried about the stats, obviously.

Maryland’s love of not getting it on was evident another couple of miles down the road, when we saw the billboard stating: “Virgin: Teach your kids it's not a dirty word.” It’s definitely not a dirty word. But neither is sex or erection or jizz (well, maybe jizz).

We were still chuckling about that one when mom pointed out my favorite. Sporting a photo of a teenage girl with her arms crossed defiantly, this billboard read: “I'm not giving it up, and I'm not giving in.” You go girl. But if you change your mind, please visit Planned Parenthood to get some actual information and a condom.

You might now be thinking that Maryland doesn’t sound at all confused about sex: They don’t much like it and when they do have it, they want the lights turned off. And that might be true, except that we passed four adult video and book stores in the approximately ten mile stretch where we saw these billboards!