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Keeping sexually active teenagers ignorant

Minister, PRD front oppose pregnant girls' education

by Eric Jackson, mainly from other media

Sexually active teenage girls? Well, maybe neither Heaven nor the sex tourism industry forbid, but the Ministry of Education is sure trying to forbid.

The ministry started out with an alarming report about a tripling of primary school pregnancies from 11 in the 2005 school year to 31 in 2006. It was admitted that all of these are the result of sexual abuse, mostly of incest. Entering into the national debate on the subject was Panama's most prominent weird psychologist, who warned that this situation could lead to something far worse --- lesbianism.

So what's an education ministry to do? Well, Education Minister Miguel Angel Cañizales, himself a psychologist who used to work for Manuel Antonio Noriega's feared intelligence/torture service the G2, told the Panamanian people, via El Panama America, of the exceptional measures the ministry is taking.

He pointed out that nine girls at Colegio Moisés Castillo Ocaña, a public high school in La Chorrera, were expelled because they were emancipated from their parents and living with men. The school's acting principal, Euribiades Domínguez, had earlier gone out of his way to humiliate the young women by making the announcement in an assembly.

Now the PRD's paper teachers' organization, the Coordinadora de Unidad Magisterial (CUM) that Martín Torrijos created so that he could avoid collective bargaining with the actual teachers' unions which are allied in the Frente de Accion Magisterial (FAM), stepped into the fray. Luis López, the government puppet who pretends to speak for the nation's teachers as a CUM "leader," called for an end to Law 29, which guarantees high school girls who become pregnant the right to continue their secondary educations in the public schools. He said that pregnant girls are at risk of injury in school classrooms and that Law 29 encourages girls to get pregnant. "If a minor becomes pregnant," López said, "the reasons have to be investigated."

Well, what else would you expect from a PRD that sent the legislature a draft Penal Code that legalized the first offense of domestic violence and allowed a proposal of marriage as a defense to a rape charge?

Tourist visa changes may be short-lived
City has second thoughts on getting rid of the Avenida Central Peatonal

Urban planning in Panama, such as it has been and may become

Emancipated high school girls expelled

The strange tale of Captain Sherman

Flowing in the streets of the capital
Panama News Briefs