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Much ado about --- teen sex? The headlines have screamed. The airwaves have been electric with rage. About what? The fact that the Panamanian Society of Architects and Engineers says that the $5.25 billion pricetag on the Panama Canal expansion project is a lowball bid, that the job President Torrijos and Panama Canal administrator Alemán Zubieta describe would actually cost on the order of $7 billion? Naaaaah --- that's a story to be buried on the inside pages, or ignored entirely. The government is paying big bucks to the mainstream media to make sure that this is so. What we are told should be our paramount concern is teenage sex. We are being bombarded with stories of adults caught in pushbuttons with minors. (Never mind if in some cases it's 18-year-old high school boys with their 16-year-old girlfriends.) We read about five public school teachers being fired for having sexual relations with their students. We watch lurid programs about an alleged American pornographer who is producing and distributing photos of teenage Panamanian boys engaged in homosexual acts with one another. We are told of 20 high school students being thrown out of school after reports of their attendance a weekend party at which sex, alcohol and drugs were among the pastimes. The case of a reggaeton singer in his early 20s being jailed for alleged sexual relations with a 14-year-old is played out in full detail. (But no word yet if he plans to do a cover of that old American blues tune, Jailbait --- "Please, Mr. Judge, I won't touch that jailbait no more.... I won't even look at her unless she's at least 44....") We are treated to a lead story about how the mothers of some 20 percent of all babies born in Panama are under 18 years of age. The reaction in high places to all of this has been an odd mix of bizarre behavior and common sense. Partido Popular legislator Jorge Hernán Rubio has a proposal pending that would criminalize all graphic nudity. Not just the commercial stuff, and not just that which portrays sexual acts, and not just the photos or videos of minors --- all nudity. Ah, but it seems like there is no money to be found in the budget for a scaffold high enough to let the honorable deputy reach the top of the Teatro Nacional to paint over the cherubs. The legislator from the party that used to call itself the Christian Democrats is unlikely to get his weird proposal to a National Assembly plenary session for a vote before the session ends at midnight on June 30 and all unpassed legislation turns into smashed pumpkins. Teacher union leader and FRENADESO spokesman Andrés Rodríguez, a high school art teacher at Colegio Abel Bravo in Colon, is calling for a review of the change made several years ago which ended the practice of girls who get pregnant being thrown out of the public schools. It seems that Rodríguez believes that there ought to be some discouragement of girls getting pregnant before finishing school, and that many of the people he represents complaining that adolescent boys act differently in the presence of female classmates whom they know to be sexually active, and this tends to create problems maintaining order in the classrooms and hallways. There may be a change in the arrangements that are made for the continuing education of girls who get pregnant while in high school, but it seems that expulsion from school or other severely punitive measures would offend a feminist movement that in another context (the Liborio García affair) has recently shown more widespread support and political force than had previously been believed possible. Leave it to El Panama America to make the issue a matter of machismo versus wimpishness. Real men, the daily argued, check to see whether their sexual partners are at least 18 years old. The Panama City municipal government has covered the capital with posters depicting a 20-something white guy decked out in a tie and handcuffs. "He didn't kill. He didn't rob," the posters say. No, he had sexual relations with a minor. Ronald H. Kelly, a former Catholic priest and former chief financial officer of the Archdiocese of Toronto into whose investment portfolios tens of millions of dollars of Canadian workers' pension fund savings have evaporated, a man with a 10-count conviction for sexual relations with underage boys, is allowed to come and go into and out of Panama as he pleases. We have immigration laws barring such people, but also a notoriously corrupt immigration office. There has never been a prosecution of a corrupt immigration official who illegally allowed a short-eye perv like Kelly to live in this country. On the other hand, Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez has called for enhanced sex education in the schools, while legislator and former education minister Susana Richa de Torrijos laments the poor preparation of schoolteachers to address the issues of adolescent sexuality they will confront. The Ministry of Education is saying that it's hearing such calls and working on some reforms to sex education programs. Panorama Catolico, the Catholic Church's weekly newspaper, made an editorial plea for better sex education and teacher training much like those of Gómez and Richa de Torrijos, and also added that there must be an ethical element in this teaching. The church couched its stand in terms of a return to traditional moral values that it claims have been corrupted by "modernism." The appeals court for Cocle and Veraguas provinces upheld the three-year prison sentence of Catholic priest Roberto González Chávez for the sexual harassment of three students he taught at a school in Atalaya. His lawyer said the decision will be appealed. El Panama America reported the results of a United Nations Development Program survey, which indicated that 14 percent of girls and young women between ages 14 and 19 had aborted a pregnancy. Abortion is illegal here, with prosecutions usually arising when a young woman suffering complications from an abortion appears at a hospital emergency room and is arrested when the nature of the problem is discovered. Every now and then, generally as the result of police and prosecutors questioning someone so arrested, a person who performs abortions is charged. The same daily also reported Comptroller General statistics that show that about one in five births are given by mothers under the age of 18 and that there has been a rise in this percentage. This, however, could be more a function of demographics --- teenagers being a greater percentage of females of child-bearing age --- than of changing sexual mores. It all makes for a great distraction for those who are into that sort of thing. There are, however, some people who are thinking seriously about the subject and there is a chance that some common sense measures may result from an uproar that in many cases has been frivolous and voyeuristic.
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