I don’t know if it can be believed, but according to the news in Canton, Ohio, one-in-eight girls in the local high school there is pregnant, which seems absolutely unbelievable to me. I mean, that’s 1-in-8 that are pregnant right this minute. That doesn’t count all the girls who just had kids, and it doesn’t count the girls who have had abortions. I’m not a statistician, but you’ve got to assume that in order for 1-in-8 to be pregnant, almost every girl in the school has to be sexually active. Either that, or 50% of them have to practically live half-submerged in semen.

I know it would be hard to prove this out, but I think that a 1-in-8 pregnancy rate would be near impossible, even if every kid got ejaculated into each morning on their way through the metal detectors.

Here, so you don’t think I just read it wrong, it what the news report said: “There are 490 female students at Timken High School, and 65 are pregnant.”

So, I started doing some digging… The first thing I found, and it wasn’t too hard, was that the school mascot at Timken High is…. guess what…. a Trojan. (Or, perhaps a busted Trojan.) A lot of bloggers will probably stop there, but, being obsesive by nature, I kept looking for an explanation.

Could it have something to do with the Ohio mystery scream, I wondered… Then, as I began looking at maps and listening to tapes of the mysterious yelping that’s been plaguing Ohio, it dawned on me that Canton is the…. guess what…. home of Diebold, the nation’s largest electronic voting company! You remember Diebold, right? It’s the company run by the Bush fundraiser who promised publicly that he’d “deliver Ohio” for the Republicans in ’04… And, oh yeah, his voting machines don’t leave an audit trail. You just push a button, walk away, and then trust him to tell you who your president is at the end of the day… So, it’s been established that there’s evil in Canton, Ohio.

Doing a little searching into the background of Canton, I found this passage in the UK paper The Guardian. It was part of a series of reports they ran from the U.S., in the run-up to the presidential election:

Between Oil City, Pennsylvania and Canton, Ohio, a hilly, leafy terrain gives way to a landscape as flat and appealing as warm Pepsi. Arriving in Canton on Interstate 77 you pass a Hoover plant, which has laid off more than 800 workers in the past seven months, and then a huge religious billboard asking: “Saved?” and offering a number to call….

And if Ohio is a marker of the national mood, Stark County (population 377,519), in which Canton is the main town, is the best indicator of what Ohio is thinking, backing the right candidate for president every election bar one over the past 40 years.

As Ohio goes, so goes the nation; as Stark County goes, so goes Ohio.

(They were wrong, by they way…. If you can believe the numbers made public. According to the Secretary of State of Ohio, Stark County did not pick the winner this year. The official numbers show Kerry having beaten Bush in the county by 3%. Of course, exit polls done that day also showed him winning the entire state. This, I suppose, is just another one of those all too common ’04 aberrations.)

Sounds like a pretty good, god-fearing little town, right? Hmmm… I wonder what happened.

(And, try as I might, there doesn’t seem to be a way to find out how many of those pregnant girls signed their virginity pledges.)

Before I go much further, let me just say that, even though I suppose there’s some part of me that finds it humorous that this would happen in a red state, like Ohio, in a town that’s pretty much owned by Bush supporters (more on that later), I realize that it’s serious. As a new father, I know how much work it is to have a little baby around the house, and I couldn’t imagine having been ready for that responsibility in high school… With that said, I would like to suggest that there might be a lesson or two to be learned here. While it’s still not known at this time just what kind of sex ed was being taught in the school, for instance, I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t working. I also suspect we’ll have to wait a while before finding out just how many abortions were performed on the young women in that same population, but my guess is that, when that number comes out, it’ll be quite high. If that’s the case, I think the whole story of Timkin High might be illustrative of the way abstinence-only education and abortion go hand in hand…

A long time ago, I posted a link here to a study that showed that the number of abortions had gone up under Bush. The conclusion of the group who had done the study was that the state of the economy and the choices people make about carrying children to term are not independent of one another. I suspect the same thing could be said about education… In other words, does abstinence-only education lead to more abortions, and, if so, how do conservatives reconcile that fundamental disconnect? It seems to me to be another point where the hypocrisy is glaring.

And, as I just brought up the economy, here’s a little something, circa 2004, about the plant closings in Canton.

On the heels of the Timken Corp.’s announcement that it will close three plants in Canton, Ohio, and displace 1,300 workers, Ohio’s Democratic delegation in Congress today took turns railing against President Bush’s economic polices…

“Despite record profits for the Timken Corp. and President Bush’s promise of one million new jobs in 2004, 1,300 additional families are added to the unemployment rolls in Ohio. I find it ironic that a year ago the president chose Timken as the location to showcase his economic policy.”

In April 2003, President Bush visited the Timken Co. in Canton to give an economic policy speech before hundreds of Timken line workers, administrators, and the company’s chief executive officer, Tim Timken. In the last three years, 222,600 Ohioans have lost their jobs; 155,000 of them in the manufacturing industry, the Democrats noted. The Timken closing represents 27% of Stark County employment, they added.

In his appearance in Canton, Bush hailed Timken’s 10% increase in worker productivity. In April the corporation reported first-quarter results of a 63% increase in earnings per share and record quarterly sales of $1.1 billion. While announcing its plans to close three plants in Ohio that employ third- and fourth-generation workers, Timken is building a fourth plant in China, the congressmen said.

“Timken stands as a model for everything that is wrong with President Bush’s incompetent handling of the U.S. economy,” said U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland of Lisbon). “Instead of a company using its tax breaks to invest in expanding production and hiring workers after reporting record sales, Timken is taking 1,300 jobs from the very community that helped make it prosperous. No wonder Mr. Bush chose Timken as the site to highlight his so-called ‘Plan for Economic Growth.'”

Two months after the president’s visit, Tim Timken co-hosted a fund-raiser in Akron, where $600,000 was collected for the 2004 Bush campaign, the Democrats said.

So, in spite of record profits, the company is moving jobs to China, and closing plants here (after, of course, using them for propaganda backdrops).

So, let’s look at what we have here… We’ve got two of Bush’s biggest fundraisers. One is closing plants and moving American jobs oversees. The other is helping to “deliver Ohio,” while counting the votes. And, across town, in the shadow of the closed factories is a school where the kids have no future, no jobs, nothing to look forward to. Is it any wonder why they might choose not to use protection? To me, it seems like a statement as to the absolute futility of it all.

It looks to me like Canton, Ohio is the nexus of evil… Maybe the pregnant girls are just a sign from God, trying to draw our attention there.

Or, worse yet, what if this has nothing to do with sex? What if the Bush “Pioneers” in Canton have somehow conspired to spread Bush seed though a network of local hot tubs and toilet seats or some such thing? What if they’re incubating a little evangelical army there, on the border with the blue states?

One thing’s for certain, no matter how you look at it – the girls at Timken High School aren’t the only people getting fucked in Canton.

UPDATE: And, as you might have guessed, it looks as though Ohio does have a law stating that only abstinence can be taught in public school classrooms. (Thanks go out to Jim for doing the research.)