Figure 2.1. Premarital Sexuality Zone
For the children. For the children.
That’s the refrain we hear—that their comprehensive efforts to destroy comprehensive sex education are ultimately designed to protect the children.
From sex.
The battle over sex education, however, isn’t about what’s safe and healthy for the children. It’s about what’s comfortable (and politically advantageous) for the adults. In the War on Sex, children are cannon fodder. The welfare of our children is being sacrificed so that adults can sleep better at night. It is, of course, supposed to work the other way around.
The battle over sex education comes down to a set of questions about values:
The battle over sex education is the battle over childhood and adolescent sexuality. The Right and government at all levels have set themselves a clear, if tragic (and ultimately dishonest) challenge: preventing young people from having sexual experiences (and meticulously ignoring their health needs once they do).
They’re asking kids to join them in an unholy alliance to deny sexuality—teaching kids to fear sexual feelings, while adults fear sexual information. They’ve put kids on the front lines of the War on Sex, demanding they patrol a minefield at a crossroads of cultural conflict.
The Bush administration gave the anti-sex educators $1.5 billion, with which they poisoned school children in every state in the U.S. Teaching abstinence has never gone away as a policy priority for the Republican Party, the Religious Right, and therefore many state and local governments. Tragically, abstinence-only-until-marriage is now taught in at least half of U.S. public schools, most private schools, and virtually 100 percent of home-school programs. Probably in your kid’s school.
And after a one-year hiatus, federal funding for abstinence has come roaring back.
Meanwhile, regardless of what their parents do or say, the overwhelming majority of today’s kids pledging abstinence will have sex before they marry1—unless, of course, their parents can magically raise the age of puberty substantially, lower the age of first marriage substantially, dismantle MTV, disconnect the Internet, eliminate cell phones, take over the fashion industry, and reverse 40 years of kids having more privacy because both of their parents (or their friends’ parents) work outside the home.
It won’t happen.
And so what we’re left with is millions of kids being systematically prepared for what they won’t experience: adolescence and young adulthood without sex. Which means they’re being systematically unprepared for what they will have: sex. Sexual feelings. Sexual relationships. Sexual decision-making.
Every culture has to deal with the sexuality of its young people. Throughout history, around the globe, boys and girls would typically mate at or near puberty (e.g., Romeo and Juliet). In many cultures, girls and boys are introduced to sex at puberty by older teens, adults, or age peers. Today, the age of consent is 16 or lower in Japan, China, India, and all of Europe except Ireland and Malta.
Most societies around the world have always assumed that young people will be sexual in their early teens, married or not. In some countries, schoolchildren are betrothed to each other and marry in adolescence. In others, schoolgirls are married off as second or third wives to old men. In Africa and elsewhere, clitoridectomy or penile subincision shape youthful sexuality. In Latin America, prostitutes often provide the first sexual experiences for young males (this was common in the United States prior to the 1960s).
But for over a century, America’s approach to youthful sexuality has been to minimize, distort, and control sexual knowledge, sexual health, sexual rights, and sexual activity of minors and unmarried young adults. (See, for example, the brutal career of Anthony Comstock.) Today this is achieved in a variety of “modern” ways, such as withholding contraceptive information, supplies, and services; criminalizing consensual teen-teen sex; removing books that mention sexuality from school libraries and school curricula; and forbidding teachers and school counselors from answering certain sexual questions or discussing certain sexual issues.
And through abstinence-only until marriage programs. Unlike other modern countries, America’s policymakers don’t debate how young to begin teaching kids about contraception, or how to help kids accept their same-gender sexual curiosity, or how young is too young for genital sex, or how to enjoy sex without intercourse. America debates how to most effectively frighten teens and keep them ignorant.
So the main sex education debate in the United States has now degenerated to teaching abstinence versus teaching “abstinence plus.” The latter is, “Abstinence is the best and safest form of sexual behavior, but just in case you blow it, here are some important facts you should know.” It’s as if medical debate were reduced to leeches versus leeches-plus-bloodletting.
Meanwhile, kids still “do it.”
They have relationships. They fall in love (regardless of our disdain for their use of the word). They use sex for pleasure or rebellion or revenge. They also use it to discover who they are, what the world is like, and what this amazing thing is that everyone wants so much to keep them away from. Sometimes they want babies. Other times they’re giving in to pressure. In other words, they use sex in many ways that adults do.
The original religious injunctions against premarital sex in Western culture were developed when the age of puberty was much higher, and the age of marriage much lower, than they are today (see Figure 2.1). Thus, it referred to a much shorter period in a young male or female’s life. And the injunction was about property, not morals. A girl’s virginity was considered patriarchal property. If you had sex with a virgin girl, you damaged her father, not her; if caught, you had to compensate him, not her.
With the age of puberty decreasing and the age of first marriage increasing, the average American now spends some 10 years being sexually mature and unmarried.2 This “premarital sexuality zone” is the largest in human history, and challenges the ideal of virginity-until-marriage in an entirely new way. There’s never been a generation in human history from whom this many years of abstinence-until-marriage has been expected.
Figure 2.1. Premarital Sexuality Zone
While it’s disingenuous to say that we are passive victims of human nature, it is important to know when social policy is attempting to rewrite human history and biology. When abstinence programs talk about traditional family or traditional values, they display their ignorance of how little today’s lives have in common with those of even 100 years ago, much less 500 or 1,000.
What are abstinence proponents trying to protect kids from?
Every one of these is a nightmare for those who war on sex. These fears explain why the premarital sexuality zone is a problem zone. At least in this regard, these people take sexuality seriously. They see sex as the ultimate gateway drug.
In the 1970s, American policy aimed to reduce teen pregnancy (and the resulting teen births). It was the golden age of comprehensive sexuality education: contraceptive decision-making, communication skills, values clarification.
But that changed in 1981. A year after completing his tenure with the Christian Broadcasting System (as a consultant to founder Pat Robertson), Senator Jeremiah Denton (R-AL) proposed to stop teen sex with the Adolescent Family Life Act. It would fund school and community programs “to promote self-discipline and other prudent approaches” to adolescent sex. It was dubbed chastity education.3 This pointless Victorian exercise has been operating ever since—with a gigantic budget Senator Denton couldn’t have dreamed of. It was, and is, the answer for everyone afraid of teen sexuality: abstinence-until-marriage.
While much of the abstinence movement is sneaky, they are honest about one thing: their goal is to indoctrinate a whole generation (and, of course, each succeeding generation). They want to change the culture of young people about sexuality, away from it being a means of self-expression, a way to get touching, a source of personal power (for better or worse, of course), a form of self-exploration and relationship rehearsal, and a vehicle for actual intimacy. Instead, they want kids to fear sex as something dangerous, something seductive that leads to shame, pain, and a ruined future. Somehow, this is all supposed to change on their wedding night. Pioneer sex educator Sol Gordon described this message as “sex is dirty—save it for someone you love.”4
The abstinence project is no less than transforming desire and eroticism from a semi-familiar, normal part of life to a not-understood, estranged enemy.
Different programs define abstinence differently. While a few say that non-intercourse sex is OK, others exclude any non-genital sex, and some even exclude any activity (such as dancing or masturbating) that generates sexual thoughts or ideas. Regardless of definition, every abstinence program says it’s for the children. No one admits it has anything to do with decreasing adult anxiety.
Abstinence education is the substitution of restriction for thinking and decision-making. As shown in Figure 2.2, it substitutes an abstinence zone for the premarital sex zone. It’s a zone that has been getting bigger every decade for the past century.
Abstinence education could be designed to be honest and dignified. (It could even be made more effective; see Taverner and Montfort, Making Sense of Abstinence [2005]). But in today’s America, abstinence training is none of these. It is so wrapped up in lies, inaccuracies, and values presented as facts that it is hard to respect the message. And as presently designed, it is impossible for kids to get value from these programs without paying an enormous price.
Let’s say society were to systematically withhold other vital information from kids—say, how to take care of their teeth. Toothpaste and floss would become illegal, the need to brush daily hushed up, the effectiveness of braces lied about, teens taught that gum disease can be prevented only by not eating sushi.
Or say that Congress decided it didn’t want certain kids (maybe the children of immigrants, or New Yorkers, or Mormons) to do well in school. We’d see widespread disinformation about study habits, libraries secretly relocated, bibliographies discredited as unreliable, and kids told that completing their assignments on time might hurt their eyes.
How would America react? Wouldn’t there be editorials and non-profit organizations standing up for those kids at risk for lifelong oral pain and school failure? How long could such policies endure?
Figure 2.2. Abstinence Expectation Zone
The war on sex education pretends to be about kids’ needs, and proponents say they want to protect kids from disease, pregnancy, and broken hearts. But abstinence programs don’t protect kids from disease, pregnancy, or broken hearts. That’s because they aren’t effective at postponing sexual involvement or at making kids safer when they do have sex. For example, a Florida State University evaluation study found that after taking an abstinence-only program, kids were more likely to agree that they should not have sex before marriage than before they began the program. But over the same period, their sexual behaviors increased.5 And most abstinence programs assume kids aren’t already having sex—which would be pretty funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
So abstinence programs don’t help kids. But they do benefit adults—both emotionally and financially. Abstinence programs help adults convince themselves that kids are less sexual than they really are. They get to maintain the illusion that kids aren’t doing it, are going to stop doing it, or aren’t going to start.
These programs also allow parents to believe that they don’t have to have a long series of talks about sex over a period of years. If kids aren’t having sex, and all they need is to be told, “Don’t do it,” there’s no reason to discuss it more than once or twice. Abstinence programs encourage parents to evade one of their key responsibilities.
And abstinence programs allow adults to feel that their kids are safe from sin, hell, and religious error (and from unauthorized pleasure). For parents who believe in such things, this concern is an enormous burden. Relief from this concern is worth almost any price to them. In this case, that price is hurting the kids about whom they’re so concerned. Abstinence also relieves their anxiety about kids’ autonomy and personal power, a key religious concern.
At the very least, the clear message kids learn from abstinence programs is, “If you have sex, do not tell us. We will be disappointed in you, God will hate you, everything around here will change.” Many adults crave the relief that their kids’ deception provides. They make kids responsible for reducing adult anxiety about childhood sexuality. But this means that as soon as kids have sex, they lose the special relationship with their parents that they may need more than ever.
The ubiquity of the abstinence goal and its programs has been a turning point in the War on Sex, both politically and financially. Abstinence has brought the War on Sex into everyone’s living room. Even if you’re not kinky, don’t want to go to a swing club, don’t want an abortion, don’t look at porn or strippers, and don’t even have cable TV, if you have kids, abstinence brings the War on Sex into your home. If you believe in pluralistic democracy—even if you’re religiously inclined—it’s arguably the single biggest challenge to your values as an American and as a sexual person.
Abstinence programs are also a forum for an explicit anti-gay agenda, although that can hardly be part of helping heterosexual kids be abstinent. (As a bonus, they terrify the millions of average heterosexual kids who think about, or experiment with, same-gender sex.) They validate adult delusions about human nature—that fear is the best motivator of behavior, that sexual decision-making is simple, that young adults can routinely abstain from sex into their mid-twenties (when most Americans marry).
The other major impact of abstinence is its economic windfall for (already tax-exempt) churches and faith-based organizations. Through it, individual churches, after-school programs, and so-called pregnancy crisis centers (actually anti-abortion centers) have received hundreds of millions of dollars—more support than received by all the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina or all the people with handicaps in the United States.
As Leslee Unruh, founder of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, has noted, “Abstinence has become a business,” one which Unruh estimates has increased by more than 900 programs in recent years.6 Abstinence has been a monster growth industry (see Figure 2.3).
The abstinence industry is a huge federal and state gravy train, but only for a narrow segment of Americans. Because non-abstinence sexuality programs—scientifically based programs that counsel kids to make good sexual decisions, to use contraception when they decide to have intercourse, to appreciate non-intercourse sex, to discuss sex with their parents, to develop good communication skills, to learn more about their bodies—are not eligible for this money. This is government money strictly for ideologically correct groups. Groups, of course, that vote. Abstinence programs are a new and completely legal way that the federal and state governments funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to religious groups that support them politically.
Figure 2.3. Federal Funding for Abstinence-only Programs
These funds, of course, find their way to those with political connections. The Best Friends Foundation received $1.5 million between 2003 and 2004; it’s run by Elayne Bennett, wife of William Bennett, and Alma Powell, wife of Colin Powell. The Medical Institute of Austin, Texas, has received more than $500,000 annually; its founder, Joe McIlhaney, has been friends with George W. Bush since he was governor. And (disgraced) former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s (R-TX) congressional district has received almost a half million dollars in funding annually.7
Your money is being used to persuade your kid to not start having sex or to stop having sex, and, either way, to feel bad and to mistrust contraception and disease protection. Your money. Your money.
As the icing on the cake, recipients of these hundreds of millions were never required to prove that their efforts are effective. More on that later.
In one sense, the policy goal of abstinence-only education is simple enough: persuade young people to not have sex before marriage, no matter when that is (and if you’re not legally allowed to marry, tough). To do this, their strategies include:
The first strategy requires lying. Because condoms work. They work better today than they ever have. They work so well, hundreds of millions of people around the world use them to shape when and if they’ll have children. They work so well, virtually every sero-discordant couple (one partner is HIV positive, the other HIV negative) who use condoms regularly prevent the HIV negative partner from contracting HIV.8 They work so well, they help prevent herpes, chlamydia, and the newest STD demon of the Right, HPV. In the 1980s, they helped dramatically stem the tide of HIV among gay men.9
Contrast this with these lies told by the Abstinence Clearinghouse:
The second strategy relies on presenting belief or opinion as fact—which also constitutes lying. A common lie of abstinence, for example, is that premarital sex ruins future marriage. But where’s the data? Abstinence advocates trot out depressed Susie in Omaha and dysfunctional Pedro in Denver, and yes, of course those anecdotes are true. But they aren’t representative. And what about kids who become terrified of sex due to abstinence programs? Girls who learn that boys only want one thing? Boys who learn to feel guilty for masturbating? Abstinence programs have no data about any of this.
Abstinence programs should be honest: “We don’t think anyone should have sex before marriage because it’s wrong. Period.” But they don’t trust the power of their own values-laden message. They bolster their message by lying about the consequences of premarital sex: depression, suicide, poor marriage options, isolation, damaged health.
The third part of the abstinence strategy is providing forums for abstinence commitment. Public ceremonies, Ring Thing, virginity pledges, and so forth sound good, and it’s easy to assume that kids are sincere when they do it. But the idea that 14-year-olds can make commitments that they will honor when they are 19 is ludicrous. Again, there’s no data to support this theory of human development. In fact, 88 percent of teens pledging abstinence have sex before marriage—that is, abstinence fails. And it fails at a dramatically higher rate than condoms or any other contraceptive method—even unreliable methods like withdrawal or rhythm.11
Public virginity pledge forums are always religiously oriented. For example, the Silver Ring Thing’s parent organization says it is an “evangelistic ministry” by which it is bringing “our world to Christ.” Young people who attend and pledge virginity until marriage receive an “Abstinence Study Bible” and purchase a silver ring inscribed with a reference to the Bible verse, “God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of all sexual sin.” Participants are also encouraged to accept Christ as their savior.12
In response to an ACLU lawsuit, federal funding for the Silver Ring Thing was grudgingly suspended in August 2005. Consequently, the Silver Ring Thing was required to restructure its program to be non-religious in order to continue to receive federal funds. But its homepage says it “promotes the message of abstinence until marriage centered in a relationship with Jesus Christ.” As founder Denny Pattyn tells teen audiences, “Unless you have God right here [patting his heart], at the center of this decision, I think you’ll struggle keeping this decision [holding up his ring finger] of putting on a ring.”13
As usual with sexuality, the Right wants it two ways. They want to claim sex is bad for kids and abstaining is good; when confronted with the data challenging this, they say, well, abstaining is good morality. OK, then it’s a moral position—which people can differ over. Then they say that, well, all our kids deserve protection.
Kids using abstinence this weekend will have sex. They’ve promised they won’t, but they will. How do we want to prepare them for this? We tell kids to wear seat belts, even though we don’t want them to crash. We tell kids to call if they’ll be late, even though we want them home on time.
What do we offer kids who don’t refuse sex the way we want them to? Nothing—no backup plan, no mnemonic devices, no support, no information to protect themselves. Ask an abstinence proponent what a kid should do if he or she has sex, and they reply, “Don’t have sex.” Denny Pattyn, founder of Silver Ring Thing, says that if “my own 16-year-old daughter tells me she’s going to be sexually active, I would not tell her to use a condom.”14
Abstinence “educators” disregard kids who have sex like so much trash. It’s a disgusting form of hostility toward our young people. It would be like withholding vitamins from kids who refuse to eat vegetables (after promising they will), or withholding toothbrushes from kids who drink soda (after promising they won’t).
After just a few years of dramatically increased funding, both anecdotes and advertising made it clear that abstinence programs were more ideology than education.
In 2002, Congressmember Lois Capps (D-CA) offered an amendment to a congressional funding bill that would have required abstinence programs receiving federal money to be scientifically accurate. Nothing fancy—just be accurate.
But the amendment was soundly defeated—it was simply too much to ask that our kids’ health would be handled with facts rather than beliefs. Such “accuracy amendments” were introduced in many subsequent years, including a 2006 amendment with 120 congressional cosponsors. The result was always the same: abstinence proponents—politicians, religious figures, civic leaders—said, “Whose science?” as if they could actually provide competing data showing that abortion does lead to infertility, premarital sex does lead to suicide, gays are mentally defective, or condoms do fail to protect against disease.
In 2004, Congressmember Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a report, “The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs.” It’s a concise evaluation of the 13 most popular abstinence-only sex education programs.15 It documents that “over 80 percent of the abstinence-only curricula used by 2/3 of [federally funded programs] contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.” Especially common were:
Here are actual quotes from these federally funded programs that actual children in actual American schools are still reading and hearing:
The Religious Right’s response (e.g., Morality in Media, Focus on the Family, Agape Press) was predictable: they trashed Waxman. They linked him to same-sex marriage. They attacked him for quoting Planned Parenthood data. They criticized his acceptance of campaign contributions from “groups that financially benefit from abortion” like the American Medical Association. They complained that he didn’t mention all the existing funding for safer sex programs.17
Since they say they care about kids, you’d imagine they were concerned, wanting to fix the programs, increase their ability to serve kids, enhance their credibility, and so forth. Instead, they attacked the report, the congressional representative, his district, and his supporters. They attacked science.
No programs attempted to improve themselves. No one apologized for or attempted to remove inaccuracies. This is clear proof that these programs are far less interested in their results than in their ideological purity—and their hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Abstinence programs resisted outside evaluation from the very start (at the same time that political conservatives were demanding that public schools and teachers prove their effectiveness). Abstinence leaders didn’t want their programs evaluated for three reasons: (1) they believed so earnestly in the ideology of the programs that they didn’t care about the actual impact, (2) they valued the adult anxiety reduction provided by the programs, (3) and they didn’t want any negative data to jeopardize the government wealth flowing their way.
For years, when confronted with questions of effectiveness, the motto of abstinence programs was “Just say, ‘I don’t know.’ ” An evaluation requirement was never built into these programs. They got away with this for years.
Then–Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was particularly hypocritical about this, as he proudly strutted his support of health care outcomes research. In 2000, he said that outcomes research was a priority “of federal efforts to improve the quality of health care in the United States.”18 And in 2003, he said, “We must continue to move forward in the collection and the evaluation, dissemination, and analysis of information related to everyday health care.”19 But the outcome data on sex education programs already existed, and he promoted federal policies contraindicated by the data.
Program evaluation is a sophisticated science used by trained experts across the industrial world, including the United States. It is possible to know how abstinence programs affect both thinking and behavior in its recipients—if someone wants the facts. Proponents of comprehensive sexuality education have wanted to know for decades, and so there are peer-reviewed, validated, and replicated studies about their programs. In reality, science has now conclusively shown:
The biggest lie about abstinence is that it works every time. It doesn’t. In the most comprehensive study ever done on adolescent health and sexuality, Columbia University’s Dr. Peter Bearman’s investigators interviewed more than 20,000 young people about virginity pledges. Twelve percent of the students who pledged virginity kept their promise. That’s a 12 percent success rate with this supposedly perfect method. That means abstinence fails 88 percent of the time—six times as often as condoms fail in typical use, six times as often as the method that abstinence advocates say is unreliable.20
In 2007, a 164-page report was published evaluating the actual results of participating in abstinence programs. The federally funded report (“The Mathematica Report”) documented clear findings, including:
Youth in the [abstinence] program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex; among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.21
The study was so well done it received the 2009 Outstanding Evaluation Award from the nonpartisan American Evaluation Association (AEA), which praised the nine-year study “for its rigor, balance, and impact, which led to major changes in federal policy and funding.” For one glorious moment, it looked like we might actually be getting rid of abstinence.
So take a billion dollars, create a bunch of religious and ideological programs filled with inaccuracies, provide no oversight, and after a few years, what do you get? Before Columbia’s study, before Mathematica’s study, information was already trickling out: These programs don’t work. Here are just a few of the many local and peer-reviewed studies that were done:
Did you know this? Probably not. It should be front page news—“Billion-dollar program crucial to saving youth of America doesn’t work.”
Predictably, America inherited the consequences of the failure of all three abstinence strategies (lie about safer sex, claim that beliefs are facts, and provide forums for abstinence pledges). Kids don’t abstain—whether they think sex is dangerous or not; whether they make public pledges or not; whether they think God will be mad at them or not. Over 90 percent of Americans have sex before marriage. The only question is whether they will have it in a physically and emotionally healthy environment. The goal of abstinence programs is to ensure they won’t.27
Although the emotionally abusive messages of abstinence programs don’t shape adolescents’ sexual behavior in their hoped-for ways, they do shape the emotional context of adolescents’ sexual behavior. So these young people use contraception less, understand less about how sex actually works, feel worse about themselves, and talk less about their sexual feelings or experiences with their parents. So abstinence programs create the worst of both worlds: non-abstinence, lower rates of contraception and disease protection, and less intelligence about sex—not only logistically, but emotionally and spiritually.
All this from people who say they care about the children.
Without question, many young people would be better off if they postponed sex by a year or two or more. (Of course, many adults would, too.)
But no social policy is cost-free. And every public policy has unexpected consequences—some of them quite unpleasant. So what do kids pay for abstinence programs?
Abstinence advocates say that a comprehensive (they call it “mixed”) message teaches kids that we expect them to fail. That assumes, of course, that shunning sex is the only form of “success.”
But what does it do to young people when we actually do set them up to fail? We are training a whole generation that when they have sex before marriage, they will have failed, that God will be angry, that they lack discipline or self-respect or love for their future partner. They will also learn that they can’t plan effectively. What kind of parents, citizens, lovers will they then be? With how many bad feelings will they associate sex—thereby undermining thoughtful sexual decision-making?
Abstinence training is a huge gamble—if kids “fail,” they can’t protect themselves. So even if a few kids benefit, the rest—the majority—pay the price. Is this a reasonable social policy—gambling that a few will make it and abandoning the rest?
And as award-wining educator Bill Taverner asks, how are programs preparing young people to make the transition from using abstinence to using a different method of contraception and disease prevention? Even if abstinence programs do help teens postpone sexual involvement, morality—yes, morality—dictates that kids be prepared for the time when they will switch to a different way of life, with different challenges. So long as abstinence programs ignore this reality, their claims of “morality-based sex education” are hollow.
Comprehensive sex education programs did pop up periodically in a few places. And as unnecessary and life-damaging teen pregnancies continued to sadden and outrage parents, a few local school districts and legislators bravely tried alternatives to abstinence. But despite the fact that they’d been scientifically tested, such programs were typically attacked.
For example, not all Wisconsin schools currently have sex education. But the state’s Healthy Youth Act passed in March 2010 required schools that do teach sex education to teach students medically accurate, age-appropriate information, including how to use birth control and prevent STDs. Parents, of course, could excuse their children from sex-education classes.
Within a month, Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth notified the county’s five school districts, saying the new law promotes sexual assault of children, and warning that teachers who follow the law could be charged with delinquency of a minor, with punishment of up to six years in prison.
“For example,” Southworth wrote, “if a teacher instructs any student aged 16 or younger how to utilize contraceptives under circumstances where the teacher knows the child is engaging in sexual activity with another child—or even where the ‘natural and probable consequences’ of the teacher’s instruction is to cause that child to engage in sexual intercourse with a child—that teacher can be charged under this statue. Moreover, the teacher could be charged with this crime even if the child does not actually engage in the criminal behavior.”
Southworth’s letter encouraged recipients to share it with school boards in their communities in an effort to get them to end sex education programs rather than follow the new state mandate.28 (See later in this chapter for the ironic update.)
And in August 2011, a Catholic parish in Rochester, New York, joined with a local “crisis pregnancy center” to mobilize opposition to the new condom availability (and expanded teen health courses) in the nurse’s office of city high schools. This, despite an opt-out option for parents who do not want their kids to have access to those condoms.29
This kind of ignorance and prejudice is common across the country, political embers waiting to burst into flame the moment a Republican or conservative is in power—not just in the White House, but in the State House, school boards, County Commissions, and local legislatures.
It’s for the kids.
In October 2011, House Republicans released their 2012 spending bill. Among other devastating cuts to vital health and education programs, the bill slashed funding for medically accurate programs to reduce teen pregnancy, from $105 million to $20 million. In addition to cutting the funding, the legislation removed the requirement that funded programs be supported by rigorous research or promising models—the requirement on which the programs’ effectiveness was based.
As a sadistic bonus, the legislation completely eliminates funding for Title X, the nation’s family planning program.
“House Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Subcommittee Chair Denny Rehberg (R-MT) should be ashamed of themselves for perpetrating such deficit-reduction hypocrisy and continuing the Republican assault on sexual and reproductive health,” said Monica Rodriguez, President and CEO of Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).30
As the 2012 presidential campaign gets rolling, Republicans and “conservative” Democrats are polishing their anti-sex, anti-teen credentials promoting abstinence. Organizations like CharlestonTeaParty.org and the National Abstinence Education Association are circling the campaign like hyena, just waiting to move in for the federal abstinence dollars they anticipate will be available after the election.
State legislatures are also getting into this anti-science, faux morality act: in 2011, for example, Wisconsin’s Senate passed a bill that would require school sex education to promote marriage and abstinence as the best way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
When it comes to sexuality, Americans under 18 are a repressed minority. In most or all states:
In other arenas, kids have rights, regardless of the needs and feelings of adults. There are laws, for example, requiring school attendance and certain vaccinations, and restricting child labor and corporal punishment, regardless of how parents or other adults feel about these issues.
But when it comes to sex, young people have no rights. Not insufficient sexual rights—virtually no rights. Their rights have been taken away in response to adults’ hysteria about their safety, anxiety about their morality, anger about their autonomy, confusion about their decision-making, and rejection of their human needs.
Sure, we regulate kids’ access to tobacco, alcohol, and driving. But there’s science backing these decisions, and kids are allowed access to unlimited, accurate information about these subjects. And we rarely tell them that young people who smoke or drink (or have car accidents) are bad, selfish, and immoral, no matter how much we want to discourage them.
Not so regarding sex.
When the United States has treated other minority groups similarly (Native Americans, people with handicaps, women, etc.), scandal has eventually ensued, and discrimination has decreased. There is still no real public scandal about the way America targets children and young adults for discriminatory treatment.
International human rights law establishes that every person, including every child, has the right to the highest attainable standard of health; the right to seek, receive, and impart information of all kinds; the right to non-discrimination and equal protection of the law; and the right to an education.31 This includes the right to information and education concerning the prevention and control of prevailing health problems.32
The United States has signed international treaties guaranteeing these rights, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,33 the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Participating countries affirm their legal obligation to refrain from “censoring, withholding or intentionally misrepresenting health-related information, including sexual education information.” The U.S. has clearly not met this basic standard.
The 1998 United Nations guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights recommend that nations “ensure that children and adolescents have adequate access to confidential sexual and reproductive health services, including HIV/AIDS information, counseling, testing and prevention measures such as condoms.”34
But according to the 2002 report of the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, “[American] federally funded abstinence-only programs, in keeping with their federal mandate, deny children basic information that could protect them from HIV/AIDS infection … these programs not only interfere with fundamental rights to information, to health and to equal protection under the law. They also place children at unnecessary risk of HIV infection and premature death.”35
Children as collateral damage in America’s War on Sex? That would be bad enough. But the repulsive truth is that, in this war, children are a primary target.