Right thinking college kids help each other keep their pants on.

Sarah MacIntyre, 19, doesn't have sex - nothing beyond kissing, holding hands and an embrace now and again. So she's excited about the new abstinence group at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"Half of me sees it as a dating breeding ground," says the sophomore French and linguistics major. "It's like, wow, there are these guys and gals who are abstinent."

And in a place like CU, where sex is assumed, finding like-minded folks demands strategy, something formal and organized, a group with its own chief operating officer and website (colorado.edu/studentgroups/CCRE).

Thus, the College Coalition for Relationship Education was launched this month by Jonathan Butler, 19, because "if you don't have a group of friends, they aren't accepting of your values," he says. "You are ridiculed."

With the coalition, he hopes, people interested in abstinence or relationships in general will have a place on campus to find support.
"There's a counterrevolution going on," says Leslee Unruh, president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. Abstinence groups began forming largely in middle schools and high schools in the 1990s, but now there "is an explosion in colleges."

By the time most teens turn 18, about two-thirds of them have had sexual intercourse, says Jennifer Manlove, a researcher at Child Trends, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., dedicated to studying children. The percentage rises when teenagers leave high school, she says.
At CU, 91 percent of students queried in a 2003 survey reported being sexually active, says Jonna Fleming, a program coordinator at the university.

But the revolution, at least for the coalition, needs a dash of sexiness.
So instead of fixing entirely upon the denial of pleasures of the flesh, the coalition will stress "relationship education" in its message.

"We're not going to push abstinence, we are going to push healthy relationships," says Shelly Stachurski, 19, an astronomy education major.
The focus on relationships is "a big topic right now," says researcher Manlove. "A lot of sex-education programs that are effective are helping teens learn how to negotiate relationships, and help them figure out what they are trying to find in their relationships."
(Thanks to the Denver Post and WND for the heads up.)