Today is Valentine’s Day, which means it is also Liberty Counsel’s “Day of Purity.” And while the Purity Bear sadly seems to have been retired, the lies spread to promote this annual event have not.
You may recall that last year while promoting the Day of Purity on Liberty Counsel’s “Faith and Freedom” radio program, Day of Purity Coordinator Amber Haskew, claimed that teens who remained abstinent would earn nearly $400,000 more in lifetimes.
It is not true, but that didn’t stop Haskew from making the same claim again this year, telling Mat Staver that “teen virgins will make across their lifetime an average of $370,000 more than their sexually active counterparts”:
As we pointed out last year, this figure comes from a 2005 Heritage Foundation report that didn’t actually provide any data to support this assertion, but simply predicted that students who abstain are also likely to do better in school and therefore have higher lifetime earnings:
Teens who abstain are likely to have greater future orientation, greater impulse control, greater perseverance, greater resistance to peer pressure, and more respect for parental and societal values. These traits are likely to contribute to higher academic achievement. In short, teen virgins are more likely to possess character traits that lead to success in life. Moreover, the practice of abstinence is likely to foster positive character traits that, in turn, will contribute to academic performance … In our society, greater educational attainment leads, on average, to higher lifetime incomes. Because they are more successful in school, teen virgins can expect to have, on average, incomes that will be 16 percent higher than sexually active teens from identical socio-economic backgrounds. This will mean an average increase of $370,000 in income over a lifetime.
So this wasn’t true last year when Haskew said it, nor was it true when she repeated it this year … just as it will not be true when she presumably asserts it again next year and forces us write this post all over again.
