By Douglas Burns

If we can’t stop our nation’s kids from ballooning toward adult-onset diabetes with their generational vacuuming of fast-food fries, bulging burgers and caloric-choked, syrupy sodas, then how can we straight-face them with preachings about abstinence-only on the topic of pre-marital sex?

It’s one thing to back away from a Big Mac but quite another for young people to have the mental reins to keep all hands north of the physiologic Mason Dixon line in romantic situations.

He who doesn’t have the self-discipline to decline the value meal could very well be the same self-indulgent cad on prom night.

For the record, I should first come clean and say I have some discomfort with this issue of pre-marital abstinence because if this adoptee’s biological parents in eastern Iowa in the late 1960s would have listened completely to their church sermons rather than succumbing to a head-rush of hormones, the world would have one fewer bastard — said bastard being me, of course.

On the other hand, perhaps believing they were in full control of their overheating holiday-time sex drives following the viewing of an after-school TV special or readings of pamphlets on premarital sex, my teen progenitors may have gone out for an evening’s fun fully intent on abstinence, and therefore found themselves stunningly ill-prepared for the spontaneous sort of amour that led to the conception of your columnist.

We are often advised by the pious, as well as most recovering drug addicts and Bob Vander Plaats, to despise the sin but love the sinner.

Where my biological mom and pop are concerned, I don’t know the sinners, but I owe my life to their sin.

All of this being said, as a society we really don’t need more bastards walking around writing newspaper columns, selling cocaine and engaging in high-seas piracy, historically, the three most common professions for the illegitimate.

We must now, as Vander Plaats and U.S. Rep. Steve King and other public Christians suggest, promote abstinence as the surest way to reduce unwanted pregnancies.

It is time for national sexual self-restraint.

And that’s why it was so fantastically heartening to find a website, www.straight-talk.com, that is devoted to abstinence and virginity before marriage — although I’m more than a little lost on their concept of a “second virginity.”

Happily, straight-talk.com offers “creative dating ideas” for couples to keep them from having sex.

Take a minute and grab a pen so you can get down some notes. Here are some “straight talk” examples of what to do on dates:

“Blow soap bubbles from your balcony;”

“Teach your dog a new trick;”

“Have a bubble-gum chewing contest;”

“Dedicate a song on the radio;”

“Skip rocks across still waters” (apparently doing this with rapids borders on suggestive foreplay);

“Have a seed-spitting contest;” and

“Wander through old cemeteries together.”

Trojan’s stock presumably plummeted several points on the release of these ideas, which, when taken collectively, surely amount to a Hoover Dam for abstinence, one that undoubtedly will squelch the desires young men have to spoil their fetching girlfriends’ white weddings.

Some of the suggestions for abstinence on this list almost seem like they were planted by a master scoundrel to actually promote sex. In a “Happy Days” manner of thinking, these abstinence-minded activities may give some kids a sporting chance at staying out of the delivery room.

But mostly they are laughable.

That’s why I would encourage young men trying to stay abstinent before marriage to hold true to the ESPN 2 Rule. This universal law of dating holds that: Going home alone with a large pizza to watch Fresno State and Hawaii on ESPN 2 is always the best way to end a Friday or Saturday night.

You’ll wake up alone, and more important, guilt-free — unless you made the mistake of taking Hawaii and the points.

Then again, the solution to unwanted pregnancies may just work itself out without any advice from straight-talk.com or me.

If the rate of obesity continues to climb, people will be utterly disgusted at the sight of each other and repulsed into celibacy.

Or they’ll just be so McFat that the mechanics of intercourse will run afoul of the Laws of Gravity — and common decency.

Unless New York’s mayor can get those giant sodas out of people’s hands to free them up for other things. CV

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.