Abstinence is kinky

For those of you who doubt my fiscal responsibility, I submit to you the following:

Under the revivalist administration of George Bush the Blunder(er), the U.S. government has transformed sex education into abstinence-only brainwashing. The administration has allocated $117 million this year to teach American teens the virtues of a sex-free life before marriage, and hopes to push that figure to $135 million.

I wish I could dismiss this as merely an ill-advised attempt at wasting limited government funds to push an evangelical Christian agenda. But the danger goes beyond state-sanctioned and -financed religious propaganda. That's because the diversion of scarce monies from sex education means teens who get a healthy dose of abstinence proselytizing don't learn about, ahem, the facts of life. Instead of learning about sexually transmitted diseases and safe sex techniques, the poor teens are duped, simply told that no extramarital sex in the only way to prevent STDs and pregnancies. Granted, abstinence is the "safest sex" and surest method for avoiding unwanted STDs and pregnancies. But it's not a lot of good once teens actually start having sex.

And therein lies the rub. These abstinence programs have only limited effectiveness. Teens listen to a sermon denouncing condoms before participating in a ceremony where they slip on a silver ring (conveniently available for $12 in the foyer) where they declare to a room of strangers that they'll abstain from all forms of sex till their marriage. But most of the teens who make the vow don't quite make it to their wedding day before losing their virginity. They might wait a year or two longer than a peer who didn't take the pledge, except that they lack common-sense knowledge about safer sex practices, such as the use of -- gasp! -- condoms, thus they end up less likely than other teens to use condoms, placing them at greater risk of diseases and pregnancy.

So here we have a government mixing religion with politics to come up with an "education" program that winds up creating a greater public health problem. As Gloria Feldt, the president of Planned Parenthood, notes, this policy is reversing the successes of two decades of safe-sex campaigns, returning U.S. sex ed to its Victorian-era state. "It is horrifying. Iit is terrifying," Feldt said. "It is back to the 1950s -- only it's even worse now because in the 1950s they simply didn't talk about it at all."

After all, what good is a conservative government if it can't reverse decades of progress?