If you're a teen in California, want to know about your "right to privacy" and "reproductive health care"? Do you need your parents' permission to get birth control pills? Can you get a pregnancy test without your parents knowing?

These are the messages the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is giving teens on its Web site - assuring them of their "right" to unbridled sexual "freedom."

Yet the consequences of this libertine philosophy are never mentioned.

Sexually transmitted diseases are now so rampant, especially among 15- to 24-year-olds, that Los Angeles County just launched a textmessaging program to curb their alarming spread, and last year, the state Assembly held a hearing on "California's Sexually Transmitted Disease Epidemic." Sacramento County has among the highest STD infection rates in the state.

Chlamydia and gonorrhea, if untreated, can lead to infertility, abnormal pregnancy and dangerous infections in the newborn; HPV infections can lead to cancers of the cervix and anus; and hepatitis B can lead to liver cancer and cirrhosis.

Unrestricted teen sex harms not only the adolescents but their children.

More than 53,000 babies were born to teen mothers in California in 2007. Many of these children end up in foster care and on Medi-Cal, and are at a high risk of crime, substance abuse, depression and school failure.

Approximately one-fifth or more of teen pregnancies end in abortion, with potential serious psychological problems for these young women later in life.

Forty percent of children in this country today are born out of wedlock. Twenty-four million have no father in the home.

The abuse of freedom is the cause of these and most of our other social problems : crime, gangs, child abuse, family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse, and cultural degradation. We have turned the "freedom" our Founding Fathers fought for - based on common moral guideposts - into "license" to do what ever we want. "License," Webster states, is "excessive, undisciplined freedom, constituting an abuse of liberty." It is time to expose the dangers of our contemporary giddy, juvenile notion of freedom as complete autonomy to do whatever we want.

Our founders believed that morality was essential to freedom. The idea of liberty as "an emancipation of the passions from moral restraint had no place in the constitutional doctrines," writes constitutional scholar Harry Jaffa.

"We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government," stated James Madison, "upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments."

People are "inherently independent of all but moral law," said Thomas Jefferson.

Ironically, the belief that we can make our own choices with no moral guardrails - crowning ourselves our own gods - is the path to tyranny of the human spirit.

Yes, we are "free" to drink or drug ourselves into oblivion, but this lack of self-restraint and personal disobedience to the laws of nature often turn into addiction and death - substance abuse perhaps contributing to Michael Jackson's death and ending Anna Nicole Smith's life. We are "free" to eat until we are 400 pounds or engage in every sexual inclination until we become chained to those habits and their self-destructive consequences.

Freedom must be tied to responsibility. It must be attached to a moral compass. It involves selfdiscipline.

It is not freedom but license that leads us to think we have the "right" to do what we want with "our own bodies"; the "right" to have children out of wedlock; the"right" to father children, then abandon them; "transgender rights"; the "right to assisted suicide"-the list goes on and on.

These are inauthentic "rights" loosed from the transcendent moral order that formed the pillars of our country and its laws.

Freedom elevates mankind.

License demeans it.

True freedom is the freedom to do what is right. We need to reinvigorate the "push" of faith-based influences against the "pull" of our desire to be our own gods, to answer to no one. This is the great battle of human nature, but we no longer understand that.

This Independence Day, let us liberate ourselves from the false idea that freedom means complete autonomy to do whatever we want without consequences.

Instead of encouraging teens down the destructive path of self-gratification at all costs, as the ACLU is, we should call on our young people to once again link freedom to a moral foundation.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "No one has a right to do wrong."

Margaret A. Bengs was a speechwriter for a California governor and attorney general. Reach her at peggybengs@hotmail.com.