Abstinence, plus a great deal of heads in the sand HOLYROOD COMMENTARY

The Executive sexual health policy is an oxymoron: just say no - except when you say yes. Abstinence plus is Cardinal O'Brien, plus a few politically correct gestures to appease the health professionals - a semantic attempt to reconcile the moral precepts of the Catholic Church with the reality of life outside its citadels of celibacy. It is a device to appease the moral majoritarians and prevent another Section 28 row. What it is not is a national sexual health strategy.

Let's face it - they just don't want to know.

The Executive has addressed one of Scotland's most serious health problems and then decided not to post the letter. It has taken five long years, countless reports and expert panels, to decide that, really, nothing very much needs to be done. A whole pounds-5 million a year is to be allocated to the task of reducing teenage pregnancy and the explosion of sexually transmitted disease.

Five million, against a Scottish health budget of eight billion.

As Paul Hutcheon explains above, the real strategy has essentially been row-avoidance.

There is little to combat the real problem which, as everyone knows, is ignorance.

Ignorance about abortion; ignorance about how to avoid pregnancy; ignorance about the danger of venereal disease and how to protect yourself and your partner from chlamydia, syphilis, HIV - all avoidable diseases which are running out of control.

The Executive has not allowed moral reactionaries to dictate policy on sexual health, but it has allowed them to severely diminish its ambition. The strategy will be national in name only, since, out of respect for cultural diversity, faith schools will permitted to teach abstinence, full stop. Sexual education will remain as it has always been - patchy, embarrassing and out of touch. Many schools won't teach it at all. Others will play the whole thing down. Contraception, the morning after pill, abortion - all someone else's problem.

Preaching abstinence, plus or minus, in the contemporary world is like teaching starving people about the dangers of anorexia. Sex is everywhere. Television is saturated with it, and the tabloids have turned it into a national recreation. If children are not taught properly about sex and relationships in a frank and open way, then they will get it elsewhere, packaged with a consumer lifestyle, or worse, as pornography, an impersonal and brutal practice devoid of emotion or spiritual significance.

Of course, it is the responsibility of parents to ensure that children are protected from the wrong kind of images and messages, but it is an illusion that the parental home or school can be sealed off from society. Try telling any intelligent teenager or tweenager that they can't look at porn websites and you can be sure that they'll find a way, pausing only to get a few tips on sexual etiquette from Irvine Welsh.

Politicians can't change the world, of course. But they can make a stand against ignorance and hypocrisy; against those who would prefer it if sex education went back behind the bike sheds. I'm tempted to say that it would have been better if the sexual health strategy been handed over to Westminster under a Sewel motion - only I fear I wouldn't be joking. It worked for civil partnership. How ironic if progressives started looking to Westminster and unionism to insulate Scotland from obscurantism. This episode partially vindicates those critics of devolution who warned that a Scottish parliament could become dominated by moral conservatives. This, remember, was why Labour ministers like Jack Straw argued so strongly against giving Holyrood the responsibility for abortion.

Of course, the Catholic Church, representing some half a million Scots, is a vital element in Scottish civil society and has every right to campaign for its own moral agenda.

However, the Scottish Executive has to govern in the interests of all the people. It has found that this is not easy. The experience of Cardinal Winning's assault on Holyrood over the abolition of Section 28 in 2000 has scarred the soul of the Scottish Executive and made it intensely cautious on all moral issues.

Yet the lesson of Section 2A (as it was properly called) was that when the issue was addressed boldly by Tony Blair in that famous speech he delivered to the Scottish Labour Conference in Edinburgh four years ago, the controversy died almost overnight. The abolition of the clause that forbade the teaching of homosexuality in schools has not led to a wave of gay porn in the classrooms, as the critics forecast. In fact, there hasn't been a word heard about the matter since Section 2A was abolished. What it took was something called authority - the magic ingredient supplied by the PM. That is what Holyrood lacks.

The sexual health strategy is a lesson in what happens when an administration loses the will to govern in key areas. Many Labour MSPs, especially women, are depressed at the turn of events, though they see little use in ranting. But the point is that if the Scottish Executive doesn't govern, then other people will do so on their behalf. When it comes to government there is no virtue in abstinence.