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Pro-Family Group Promotes Sexual Purity
Goal to Reach 40 Million Youth By End of Year

Members of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification are taking their message to the streets of America, holding rallies and asking young people to recite a pledge of sexual abstinence before marriage. Their goal is reach 40 million American youth before the end of the year with the abstinence message. As of now, according to their New York office manager Jorg Heller, they have reached around 6 million.

The pledge, called the Pure Love Pledge, is written on a card and handed to young people with a request that they recite the pledge and commit themselves to refrain from sexual activity before marriage.

"We've had a tremendous response in Harlem," said Juanita Pierre-Louis, a Family Federation leader in New York. "One woman came running up to me after she read the card and threw her arms around me and said this is exactly what our young people need to hear." Heller states that Family Federation members around the country, many of them housewives with children in tow, report a tremendously positive response to the initiative.

Abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage are bedrock beliefs of the group founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who blessed in marriage many of the group leaders in Madison Square Garden in 1982. Seventeen years later, these couples have teenagers who are dedicated to maintaining their sexual purity in a youth culture in which the word virgin is almost a foreign term.

In order to spread the message further, hundreds of these Unificationist teenagers have toured America and overseas during the last three summers with an organization called the Pure Love Alliance. Using street theater, rock music, service projects and rallies, the teens generally get favorable responses from crowds and civic leaders and good media coverage.

Abstinence education in schools has gained greater acceptance among educators. Presidential candidate George W. Bush announced that he would increase the federal investment in abstinence education if elected.