100,000 Youths Pledge Chastity Until Marriage
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ORLANDO, Fla. — Southern Baptist youths want a sexual revolution, and their revolt’s biggest volley came Tuesday in a stadium-sized display of 100,000 cards pledging chastity.
Working under a broiling sun, hundreds of Baptist teen-agers placed the written vows in plastic holders that covered 50,000 square feet in front of the Orange County Convention Center, culminating a churchwide True Love Waits campaign.
Inside, the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention got under way.
“It’s a way to tell the world not to have sex before marriage,” said 13-year-old Katy Burks of Waxahachie, Tex. “It’s really important to me. All my friends . . . are getting pregnant and it hurts to see them getting hurt like that.”
Since its start more than a year ago, when 59 teen-agers took vows in a Nashville, Tenn., church, the True Love Waits campaign has inspired 102,000 youths in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination to pledge to abstain from sex before marriage.
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