In order to make reading these easier, I am posting these two pieces in a way that makes them easier to read as a visitor scrolls down the page. Hope it makes sense.
Think Progress has a piece highlighting a Washington Post article from Sunday.
On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA) is launching a $1 million “Parents for Truth” campaign. Its mission is to enlist 1 million parents to back abstinence-only education by lobbying local schools and working to elect supportive lawmakers. Last week, the NAEA e-mailed “30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week.”
One quote from the article that TP does not highlight comes in the fourth paragraph, and is both ignorant and frightening:
"There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children," said Valerie Huber, the group's executive director.
Ms. Huber is quoted further down in the article:
"Parents are being misled. They are told the content of the curricula in their children's classrooms stress abstinence and just have information to make decisions in case they become sexually active," Huber said. "But most of these programs provide explicit how-to information that give teens a green light for activities that put them at risk."
In between these two quotes comes the money shot, literally and figuratively speaking:
The [Parents for Truth] campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorize about $190 million in federal funding for such programs, which have come under increasing criticism because of a series of reports that concluded they are ineffective. Such criticism has prompted at least 17 states to refuse federal funding for such programs.
So Congress is deciding whether or not to pour good money after bad down the rat hole of abstinence-only sex education. Ms. Huber says that parents are being "misled", yet who is doing the misleading?
"It's a classic fear and smear campaign," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a private, nonprofit Washington advocacy group. "It's absolutely misleading."
Wagoner and others condemned abstinence-only programs as having been proved ineffective.
"We've wasted $1.5 billion on so-called abstinence-only programs that don't work," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "That's why parents want education programs in our schools that do work and will keep teens healthy -- by including information about abstinence as well as contraception, healthy communication, responsible decision making, and prevention of sexually transmitted infections."
What is most fascinating about this entire episode, is the past of Valerie Huber, the person responsible for developing this "Parents for Truth" campaign. Some "Truth" about her might be helpful. From Think Progress:
Valerie Huber, the NAEA’s executive director, was found guilty of “neglect of duty” while at the Ohio Department of Health in 2006. She “participated to a substantial degree in the selection of a vendor” for which she also worked. Huber was given a one-day suspension from her position. . . . An abstinence-only conference planned by Huber in October 2005 had been criticized for its “overt Christian messages and anti-gay speakers, including ones openly recruiting for the ‘ex-gay’ movement.”
I would be the last person to say that we should not teach our children that sexual abstinence is a sound choice. The problem, as demonstrated in study after study, is that abstinence-only sex education is a dismal failure precisely because it fails to provide enough information to our young people to make that decision in a context in which they understand what it is they are abstaining from.
In 1989, I took a youth group I was leading to a concert by the Christian rock band Petra (kind of like Journey for Jesus). In between sets, some guy (of whom I had never heard at the time) named Josh McDowell got up on stage and spent a good twenty minutes haranguing a crowd full of teenagers on the multiple dangers posed by human sexuality. It reminded me a bit of Eddie Murphy's routine from his first comedy record, in which, after reviewing the progress in STDs from gonorrhea to herpes ("you keep that shit forever, like luggage") to AIDS, he foresaw a time when, "you put your dick in and it explodes." Except, McDowell did it in a way that was not only not funny, it was frightening. I was horrified that an adult would subject a captive audience of ignorant youth to such a torrent of fear-mongering.
I have no doubt that "abstinence-only" sex ed today is little removed from McDowell's rant. Its utter failure to achieve any substantive goal, whether reducing teen pregnancy or even delaying the age of the onset of sexual activity, should be enough for serious, responsible parents who have a regard for "truth" to reject it as a pedagogical tool.
