History
Silver Ring Thing was created in 1995 by Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister from Yuma, Arizona, as a way to combat what he saw as rising rates of STDs and pregnancies amongst teenagers, as well as a way to protect teens from what the founders saw as a distinctly American obsession with unhealthy (in opposition to biblical standards) sex, which, according to Pattyn, was a byproduct of the “promiscuity the sexual revolution of the ‘60s”.
In 2000, Pattyn became Executive Director of the John Guest Evangelistic Team of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and SRT became part of the national outreach of the John Guest Team.
In 2004, SRT claimed to have won pledges of chastity of more than 16,000 young adults since its inception, and Pattyn stated that SRT planned to have rings on the fingers of 2 million youngsters by 2010.
Initially, SRT was funded entirely by private sources, but beginning in 2003, SRT began receiving money from the federal faith-based initiatives program. By 2004, SRT had received more than US $1,100,000 in U.S. government federal funding.
In 2004, SRT began expanding operations into the United Kingdom, with mixed results. While some teens in the UK embraced the message of abstinence, some critics rejected and ridiculed SRT, claiming it was anti-sex or unrealistic, and have stated that it seems unlikely that abstinence programs will attract widespread support in the UK because of the UK's different attitude about sexuality and sex education, but the group's Assistant National Director for the UK, Denise Pfeiffer, says there is a real need for such a movement in the UK to curb what she sees as the ever-increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies, both of which she claims are the highest in Western Europe.
Read more about this topic: Silver Ring Thing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)