You know who's really enjoying the Mark Souder infidelity scandal? Avi Zenilman. His fond childhood memory:
Souder frequently meddled with CDC research into at-risk behavior, and made life difficult for medical researchers of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. For example, in March 2004, Souder hauled Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, a former C.D.C. officer and S.T.D. specialist at Hopkins who happens to be my father, before his committee and proceeded to lecture him on the sins of condoms and sex outside of wedlock and its liberal enablers.
My dad, at the time "speaking as a proud parent of three teenagers" (I've grown up since then!), thought it was important to push a message of delay, but that demanding celibacy was just not going to work. "An
abstinence-only approach which excludes safer sex messages and includes messages that emphasize intercourse only within the context of marriage, is therefore clearly out of touch with the realities and practices of the vast majority of Americans," he said, complaining that the whole debate was "framed in an absolutist stark context."
Souder ultimately responded by saying that teen sex needs to be aggressively confronted, like date rape, because out-of-wedlock sex always leads to pregnancy and ruins lives.