HuffPo Helps Woman Scapegoat Abstinence for Bad Marriage

Author tells HuffPo Live not sleeping with fiancé a mistake.

“Just do it” before you say I do, HuffPo Live suggested when interviewing Jessica Ciencin Henriquez last week. Bashing programs that promote abstinence until marriage, author Henriquez attempted to blame her bad marriage on the fact that she stayed a virgin until the wedding.

HuffPo Live host Marc Lamont Hill was all support for Henriquez’ blame-game: “As the saying goes, you wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive, would you?” Under the headline: “No Sex Before Marriage A Bad Idea, Says Author,” HuffPo devoted a half-hour segment to counting down reasons to give up purity before marriage.

Henriquez, who wrote about her “mistake” of keeping her virginity until marriage, said that her wedding night was a “rude awakening” and she discovered that she had no chemistry with her husband … and that he didn’t take bedside criticism well. “There were some issues that I wasn't really aware of in our relationship that came to light in the bedroom,” she claimed.

But anybody reading Henriquez’s original article on the leftie site Salon.com would see that it wasn’t abstaining until the wedding that broke up her marriage. It was much more likely that, as she herself admitted, she didn’t really know her husband at the time she got married. “It dawned on me how much we hadn’t learned yet about one another,” she wrote.

By her own account she and her fiancé had not-so-wonderful communication and a relationship largely driven by lust. She summed up their dating life as “two years of halting wandering hands as they grazed under blue jeans.” She also claimed her boyfriend “spent years trying to convince her that just the tip didn’t count.” (Sounds like a real prince, Jess.)

She threw up before the wedding because she didn’t want to marry the guy, but did anyway. Her version of the wedding day – complete with condoms – makes it sound like their relationship was a mess, and she knew it, long before she ever made it to the marriage bed.

Gee, this could be crazy, but maybe the problem with Henriquez’s marriage wasn’t that she took an abstinence pledge, but that she had a lust-centered engagement and married a guy she knew she didn’t really have a solid relationship with? Maybe the problem was that she rushed into a bad match just because it was hard to keep “her knees locked since puberty” until she found the right guy.

Well, given that she concluded her article by listing off a handful of people she had “amazing” sex experiences with, including “a bartender who only knows your first name” and “a pilot you meet on vacation in Costa Rica,” perhaps it’s not surprising that Jess’ judgment when it comes to men looks a little shaky, to say the least. And given that sexual libertinism is one of HuffPo’s favorite subjects, it’s not much of a surprise they’d rally to support Henriquez, either.