Continuing the Abstinence Education Discussion
December 10, 2004
Joe at the Evangelical Outpost writes in "Let's Think About Sex":
"...the debate between “comprehensive” and “abstinence-only” sex education programs is itself a misguided focus on a false dilemma. Both approaches are primarily concerned with indoctrination toward a particular viewpoint and inoculation against the effects of certain behavior. Neither is concerned with providing a true education. The abstinence advocates, for example, want teens to 'just say no' while the comprehensive crowd want students to 'just wear a condom.' Both are more concerned about “effectiveness” than with teaching teens how to think for themselves about human sexuality.
Now we're getting somewhere. Maybe next week I'll have the strength.
Posted by Ambra at December 10, 2004 2:57 AM in Culture
Aw man, you missed your chance!
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Wrote this to ...
Christina Siderius, The Daily:
Your sex talk evolved in mysterious ways from a pro forma put-down of conservative abstinence education to an apparent validation of abstinence.
The put-down was premised on the assertion that promoters of abstinence are promoters of ignorance. They want to send children into a hormonal world without the facts to guide them through microbial minefields.
In fact, facts are the problem. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead demonstrated years ago that liberal comprehensive sex-ed curricula are long on facts
(apply latex; insert Tab A in Slot B; repeat), but come up short on meaningful measurements of success. When BDW compared stats from
comprehensive districts to conservative districts, she found that the successes of comprehensive sex ed were bad or "bad," depending on your bias: students given all those "feels good, do it" facts in comprehensive classes succeeded in getting pregnant and in getting disease way more often than their conservatively taught peers.
You alude to some of the information that fact-based liberal education failed to convey. No latex condom protects against HPV. No condom is
foolproof or fail safe, because hormonal persons are fools and because condoms have a micron problem: the natural pores in latex exceed the diameters of some viruses. Few blue-state liberals want to show pictures of superating sex organs to boys & girls who just wanna have fun.
All that information, often not imparted in "comprehensive" curricula, are subsumed in abstinence education. Abstainers were already
promoting a point of view that you were on the cusp of reaching after seeing some superating evidence you ignored before.
The blue-state stereotype of abstinence ed is this: Emotionally constipated conservatives push pleasure-denying just-say-no negativity because they're afraid that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time. In fact, abstainers were and are way ahead of the curve on an important fact of life that feel-good liberals learned belatedly, if at all: We have sex with every partner our partner(s) ever had.
Liberal sex education, often based more on 1960's hedonism and feel-good "facts" than on information, needs to go to a good school and
learn that the Sexual Revolution's over. The microbes won.