Or so you might think if you watched MTV’s Choose or Lose 2000: Sex Laws, a "documentary" that was really a commercial for anything-goes attitudes toward sexuality—the kind that make MTV all its money. It was also something of a commercial for Al Gore.

The ostensible purpose of the program was to raise turnout among voters ages 18-24, currently projected to be miniscule (30 percent or less). But it’s potential Democratic voters the network was clearly after. It comes down heavily on the liberal side of sexual abstinence, abortion and homosexuality, and provides Bush/Gore comparisons that amount to much more than subliminal Gore endorsements. It also runs a clip of Gore (but none of Bush or any other candidates) in which the vice president declares that it’d be "wrong" to keep the abortion drug RU-486 off the market "for some kind of political reason."

Whether Choose or Lose will actually succeed in upping the "youth" vote remains to be seen.. But it doesn’t spare any effort, relentlessly warning viewers against prudish bedroom cops who will soon be kicking in their doors.

"You may think that what you do is nobody’s business," a young woman narrator opens, "but if you do it in this country Uncle Sam will have his say." The message repeats throughout the program: "what you need to know about the sex laws that could change your life forever," "laws that can effect your sex life," "the fate of your reproductive rights may hang in the balance." In case you still haven’t gotten the point, a male narrator concludes the show: "You’d better pay attention, because your sexual freedom is at stake."

When it’s not the narrators hammering the point home, it’s the guests. We hear from a woman from Planned Parenthood who complains that abstinence education is "fear- and shame-based," a group of gay youth activists, a homosexual male couple, and "pro-choice" actresses Kristin Davis and Kathy Najimy, among others. (Najimy delivers the compelling argument that she doesn’t want Sen. Jesse Helms telling her she can’t get an abortion "because he’s a stupid moron.")

To preserve an air of neutrality, Choose or Lose does find a little time for opposing voices — a pregnant girl who’s against abortion, a few teens who’ve chosen abstinence. But that time is very little: about three minutes of the half-hour show. And the liberal side always gets the last word.

A high school girl who suggests condom handouts increased her classmates’ promiscuity is immediately contradicted by another girl ("that’s totally wrong") who launches into the standard "safe sex" spiel while MTV’s interviewer nods approvingly. A profile of a girl who had a baby asks her if she could be a poster child for pro-lifers, then zooms in for a close-up when she irritably denies it and earnestly proclaims the "pro-choice" view. And so on. By the time the show reaches the last segment, on homosexuality, it doesn’t bother to present even token opposition. (Only bigots could possibly object to homosexuality anyway, right?)

What’s most ironic about the program is its mocking use of crude, black-and-white clips from ancient anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality propaganda films. Choose or Lose is every bit as propagandistic as those films; it’s just slicker. A narrator claims that before abortion was legal, women tried to do it themselves "with tragic results" (pictures of a coat hanger and a morgue pop up). A gay man pulls the drapes shut, plunging into darkness the living room where he and his "partner" live, while a narrator lectures about society’s intolerance. Hey, we get the message. Opposing abortion or homosexuality is just plain mean.

Of course, had the producers been interested in getting their facts straight, the documentary would’ve taken a very different angle.

Take the alleged deaths from self-inflicted abortions. Statistics have always shown these to be virtually nonexistent. A few years ago ex-abortionist Bernard Nathanson (cofounder of what is now known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) blew the whistle, admitting that the abortion industry had fabricated the numbers. You’d never know this from Choose or Lose.

Or take the show’s assertion that since 1995, Congress has imposed abstinence-only education on the nation’s schools. In fact, Congress that year did authorize funding for programs that teach abstinence as the standard, but also continued their policy of funding "safe sex" programs. Moreover, abstinence still gets just a fraction of the money "safe sex" does. You’d never know this from Choose or Lose either.

Most of all, take the stories the show could’ve told but didn’t. Women who’ve suffered the emotional ravages of post-abortion syndrome. "Pro-choicers" who’ve turned pro-life. Ex-gays who now have happy family lives. Choose or Lose doesn’t talk to any of them. Nor does it present, for more than a few seconds, the intelligent, articulate Christians who could make the case for a biblical view of sexual relationship.

None of this comes as a surprise from MTV, of course. Nor is it a surprise when you consider that the program was produced in "partnership" with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading sponsor of "safe sex." The makers of the show had an agenda; they just didn’t have the honesty to admit it.

Those of us who are Christians may be forgiven for thinking that someone else has an agenda too.

"We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger," says the devil in C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters. "Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism."

Sounds like MTV’s gotten with the program.