Sunday, June 01, 2008
They Are Baaack, Abstinence Only Sex Education Promoters
“How did sex come to be thought of as dirty in the first place? God must have been a Republican.”
---Will Durst
Rob Stein, Washington Post Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach. The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign. The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach. "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. The 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. |
No wonder. The current incumbent of the White House -- one of the biggest hypocrites to come down the pike -- who had committed "youthful indiscretions" is a champion of abstinence. One needn't ask what his indiscretions were. We don't know what the leaders (men and women) of the abstinence only campaign did in their youth. Angels are said to have no memory. Good for them. Or, like G.W. Bush, one fine morning they found god, became born again and stopped thinking of sex outside marriage. They want to protect our children from the dangers of sex education that includes safe sex practices. To them, condoms are bad; prayers are the answer to combat the primeval urge.
Touchy area....sex. It would be interesting to hear what position do the contenders in the race for the White House take on this issue. They would rather stay away from speaking about it to escape ire of the Bible thumpers. Remember Bill Clinton's craven surrender in the Jocelyn Elders controversy? Dr. Elders, who was confirmed as surgeon general by the senate in 1993, made a public statement about the benefits of masturbation, and the sky fell down. When she refused to resign, Bill Clinton fired her in December 1994.
