(PLYMOUTH ROCK) When Fundamentalist Christians' forefathers, the godly Puritans, founded this formerly Christian nation, they didn't give out A's in school to young ladies who knew what an erect, bobbing penis looked like. Instead, the only A such a harlot could expect to receive was a scarlet one sewed on her pinafore.

As True Christians, the Puritans were embarrassed by the Lord's most unsavory creation – biology. While it was encouraged to talk graphically about how Cain brutally bludgeoned Abel, it was verboten to allude to how either brother was conceived, much less the necessarily incestuous liaisons that led to ribless Adam's grandchildren. Quite simply, it was polite to talk about procreation by the de-boning of a man, but not by the boning of a woman.

Knowing that the Devil is in the details, the serious-minded, vinegary Christians of colonial Salem, Massachusetts were too pious to discuss the actual biological acts that would lead to a public hanging. This lack of information led to many a surprised, yet sated, person finding a coarse, itchy noose around his neck.

With their very successful Talk About It And You Drown campaign, the Puritans set the groundwork for the current Abstinence Only craze in our nation's schools by pioneering the Christian concept of education based purely on aphorisms in lieu of so-called "facts."

"What made the Talk About It And You Drown concept so successful at cutting down on extra-Biblical conversation," noted Christian historian Ebert Johnson on the 700 Club's What You Don't Know Can Help You show, "was that no one ever knew what 'It' was."

In today's Christian public schools, "it" is any information about naked bodies that don't talk to snakes. Abstinence Only education is based on the sound values-based principle that children don't need to know what it is they are being asked not to do. While Abstinence Only education may not stop unsaved teenagers from having sex, it certainly spares their precious little ears from tawdry biological facts that polite people have no business discussing in the first place.

At the forefront of the Abstinence Only movement has been Mrs. Betty Bowers' ministry Saving Love Until The Sacrament, which teaches girls that Jesus gives them a choice: If they want to spread their wings in heaven, they had better not spread their legs in high school. Thousands of teenage girls throughout North America have thrown away their Lolita-styled midriff-baring "Britney Spears" clothes, replacing them with Saving Love Until The Sacrament's modest, sturdy, high-collar frocks bearing the ministry slogan: Abstinence saves the tart from plunder.

Proscription without discussing sordid details is nothing new in Christian America's efforts to sanitize its population from the unpleasant. Republican Nancy Reagan's highly effective Just Say No to Drugs campaign would have eliminated all drug use (except for prescription abuse for back pain by celebrities – even the Lord is powerless in the face of that much disposable income in the hands of the pathologically insecure) had the Clintons not usurped the White House for eight years, implicitly encouraging our youngsters to experiment with narcotics and plausibility. It was Mrs. Reagan's refusal to even discuss drugs that made her campaign to eradicate them so completely successful.

In response to the concern that children don't need to hear sensationalist details about how their sinful little bodies function, conservative Christians have decided to apply the same "facts are not our friends" approach to topics other than sex education and drugs, starting with illness. In the past year, they have launched a grass roots Just Say No To Colds campaign throughout local school systems in hopes of eradicating the common cold – and possibly certain forms of contagious cancer – by the year 2004.

In laying out the groundwork for the Just Say No To Colds curriculum, Mrs. Betty Bowers recently announced at a Concerned Nosy Women for America luncheon: "When you think about it, there is a reason why the 'common cold' gets its name. The way it is transmitted is very common indeed and highly inappropriate – especially for Christian young ladies."

After ensuring that their were no unmarried women in the conference room, Mrs. Bowers added: "Without wallowing in the purely sensationalistic aspects of how this biological event occurs, when a person coughs, wet sloppy germs go from his mouth into someone else's moist areas -- their mouth. It is sad to say that this unseemly contact often occurs in public between complete strangers. There is certainly no need for an impressionable young person in school to know such salacious details. That is why Christians everywhere should ban health teachers from talking about such inappropriate so-called 'biological facts.' Instead, True Christian school curricula should limit health instruction to a terse, but emphatic: Just say No to Colds. When you have Christian values in the classroom, you don't need knowledge."