In recent days, some high-profile comments about sexual behavior have given people the opportunity to attack an ancient ideal and mock others' religion or parenting. And that's just for starters.

Some gasbags have also presumed to settle thorny matters of international AIDS policy and the content of American education -- and all because the pope and Bristol Palin had something to say about sex.

Embarking in mid-March on his first trip to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI answered a journalist's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's position on fighting AIDS (chastity outside of marriage, faithfulness within) by asserting, "One cannot overcome the problem [of AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem."

The pope was, of course, widely jeered. In a powerful rebuttal to his critics, however, Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik pointed out that scientific research supports the pope's statement. As Bishop Zubik noted in his Post-Gazette op-ed last Monday, Edward C. Green, the director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard University, has reported a clear correlation between falling HIV infection rates and changing sexual behaviors.

But Dr. Green has gone further, declaring, "If AIDS prevention is to be based on evidence rather than ideology or bias, then fidelity and abstinence programs need to be at the center of programs for general populations."

Speaking of ideology and bias, consider that the pope was castigated for his (true) assertion, while the (false) assertion in the journalist's question -- that church policy is "unrealistic and ineffective" -- went unchallenged.

"Not realistic" was the similar term Bristol Palin used several weeks ago in a headline-making interview. When the new single mother (and 18-year-old daughter of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin) was asked whether she had used contraception or had a "religious opposition to it," Ms. Palin stumbled, demurred and eventually said, "Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all."

The "not realistic" part was widely greeted as a swipe at the abstinence education Ms. Palin's mother endorses. But the opposite meaning is clear both from this quote and from the whole teen-speak interview: She respects and upholds the moral ideal yet knows from personal experience that many of us will fail to achieve it.

Opponents of abstinence-only education correctly criticize it as inadequate: What you don't know can, in fact, hurt you. We owe it to our children to arm them fully -- at an appropriate age -- with the information they need to lead a physically and emotionally healthy life. Note: This includes the fact that both good intentions, and condoms, can fail.

But as with the pope and the reporter, those in this ongoing debate who regularly withhold or distort the facts, without being called to account for it, represent the side that seems emotionally invested in promoting the utter OK-ness of unrestrained sexual freedom.

The year opened with a mind-boggling example of this cultural bias. In late December, researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a study alleging that premarital abstinence pledges don't work.

Under the headline "Sex Abstinence Vows Fail," this paper on Dec. 30 carried a Washington Post article on the study that declared, "Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do."

Only several paragraphs into the story was it revealed -- sort of -- that researchers were not examining American teenagers in general. They were purposefully comparing religious teenagers who made an abstinence pledge with otherreligious teens who did not. They did not compare the kids who broke their "virginity pledge" to the great mass of American youth, most of whom have never even considered it.

The facts substantiated by this study and many others remain: Religious or socially conservative families produce teenagers who become sexually active, on average, at 21 -- about four years later than other teens -- whether or not they make an abstinence pledge.

In the Post-Gazette, however, the article was trimmed too early for readers to see in sufficient detail that the study compared only groups of teens from religious and socially conservative families. And as similar articles appeared nationwide with headlines like "Virginity Pledge Doesn't Stop Sex," who knows how many readers would have read far enough to learn the study did not prove what it seemed to claim.

It's hard not to wonder whether the intent of such "research" and "reporting" is to undermine our culture's desire for the ideal. But it is utter folly -- and a real lack of love -- to remove from children's thinking the possibility that there are noble things to strive for -- even in their sex lives.