My children attend the local public school. All public schools have a zero-tolerance drug policy, which in addition to the requirement to completely ignore any common sense also means two things:
1) my child cannot so much as bring an aspirin to school
2) the school nurse cannot administer an aspirin to any student at any time unless a parent specifically supplies the pill and instructions for a specific day.
So, to find out that a middle school - kids aged 11 to 14 - in Maine is providing birth control pills to students WITHOUT letting the parents know and now my head is going to EXPLODE!
Zero tolerance policies are the sad result of our overly litigious society and need to be retired. Doesn't mean we can't still have and enforce rules against bringing guns to school or drugs or whatever.
I don't know if I agree or disagree that birth control would actually encourage more sex or not. Frankly, I don't care and that's not the point. We simply cannot have the gov't try to be the parent for us - especially without our knowledge. There are lots of bad parents out there, but frankly that's none of the government's business to make those decisions.
As for my head exploding, that's just for the sheer stupidity of the public school system which, since it is tied together with my school through the government bureaucracy, is not as far away from me as it might be geographically. You can be darn sure that I would make it 100% clear to my child's school that my wife and I, and only my wife and I, will make decisions regarding birth control with our daughter. And if they can't abide by that, then we'll choose a different school.
There are children in our society that don't necessarily have one parent that involved in their lives, let alone two. What's to be done with them? Should the government be concerned with them or no? What about the public schools? They can't hardly treat every kid different, can they? So in trying to strike a balance do they infringe a little in some cases while still not doing enough in others?
Does seem like an extreme example, I'm actually quite surprised that this is happening.
Quietman has the right idea. Elect the people we really want to represent us.