It’s not just that the conservatives made a mistake about Ab-Only–it is that the conservatives’ goal was never to reduce disease, never to fight the viruses and bacteria that parasitically destroy people’s health.
The goal was pork for conservatives:
Anne and Gordon Badgley, who received $9 million in federal grants for their nonprofit, Heritage Community Services, also set up Badgley Enterprises to market and sell their abstinence-only curriculum, Heritage Keepers. While Heritage’s IRS 990s are sketchy and marked by vague expenses, even a student loan repayment, they clearly show that the Badgleys pocketed $174,201 from the taxpayer-funded nonprofit by buying the curriculum from their own private company.
You could present the evidence of widespread STDs among young people to a conservative to change their mind about it, but it’s very hard to change a person’s mind when their salary depends on them keeping their belief.
You might try to blame this on George Bush, but his heir apparent, John McCain, wants to keep abstinence-only programs, wasting our money and growing the microbes.
The New York Times Web site reported the following exchange with a reporter in Iowa in March 2007:
Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”
McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”
Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”
McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”
McCain is lying through his teeth here. In the 1960s, every sailor in the USN was taught how to prevent VD. But he’s going to keep letting the disease spread, if it helps him win conservative votes.
h/t d at LGM.
The New York Times article to which you linked first was particularly alarming.
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p>Social conservatives seem to be so strongly convinced that abstinence only education should work that they find empirical evidence unconvincing.
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p>The spread of HPV is a tragedy — and the idea that one shouldn’t immunize against it so that it encourages abstinence is morally repugnant, but that’s what these monsters advocate.
… is for godless wimps.
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p>I’m all for personal responsibility, but people need access to options to make good choices.
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p>Add this one to Bush’s legacy.
Personally as someone who has taken modern sex ed classes as recently as three years ago abstinence was never even discussed as an option. Instead we learned how easy it is to get an abortion, how easy it is to put on condoms, we learned about sex toys which in my view contribute little to preventing STDs, and we learned about why gay people deserve equality.
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p>Perhaps this is skewed since I went to high school in Cambridge but I do think abstinence only is wrong, especially when it is not coupled with safe sex options, on the other hand I think bringing things like sex toys and abortion into the discussion create a sense that sex is a consequence free endeavor. There was never any talk of love, never any talk of knowing your partner, never any talk of at least waiting until your in a long term emotional relationship. It was merely reducing sex to a mechanical and physical act that had literally mechanical devices to ensure maximum safety and pleasure. Voters support abstinence education since the broad majority of people are in loving relationships with their sexual partners and dislike this notion of reducing sex and people to commodities that can be mechanically integrated.
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p>There definitely needs to be a balance and teaching the kind of secular morality that intimate sexuality ought to be within the context of love something preachers and psychologists agree is essential to emotional health and well being, in addition to safe sex practices, would be the ideal way to go.
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p>On a lighter note the article made me feel much less sad about being single for three years since I might have dodged a bullet.
We don’t have to “think” this anymore. We know it empirically.
Im not utilitarian and liberals ought not to be. We should proudly defend, protect, and expand the dignity of the human being whenever we can. This includes issues of sexuality, and I think it is far more important than our children are taught that their bodies are not just mere tools for pleasure but are in fact very important parts of them that ought to flourish under an atmosphere of respect within an emotional relationship.
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p>Numbers are important but if we stick only to numbers the social conservatives win, since we remove any talk of dignity, respect, or philosophy from the table and its dangerous to stick only to numbers.
You and I don’t need to frame and campaign. That was my point. You and I should care about numbers when we discuss policy.
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p>And I don’t favor crass utilitarianism but deontological and virtue ethics have their problems too. I’d almost say, following Churchill, that utilitarian ethics are the worst ethics except for all the others. That’s speaking from a policy perspective.
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p>I’m so Rockridgian in my perspective that I may begin to look like George Lakoff soon. No argument on the importance of rhetoric to reveal the truth. However, smudging the empirical and rhetorical levels of the discussion is a nice way to go fruitlessly in circles.