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MORE ON THE OBEY COMPROMISE. Lindsay Beyerstein has some follow-up reporting on the compromise that increased funding for "abstinence-only" recently discussed by Ann:
Even opponents of abstinence-only education might concede that a few extra million for abstinence education is a small price to pay for easing the passage of a very important domestic spending bill that contains a lot of spending that's important to Democrats.Yet, principle is at stake here. Few people realize that the CBAE program promulgates out-and-out quackery and barely disguised religious dogma. These programs don't just encourage students to remain abstinent as teenagers. By law, they are required to teach "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity," among many other stipulations. In other words, the program must teach that all sexual activity outside of marriage, even between consenting adults, violates some nebulous "expected standard."As with many legislative compromises, it's hard to evaluate the trade-offs here. Abstinence-only education is not merely useless but potentially harmful, and funding it discourages more rational sex education. On the other hand, it's not clear that is harmful enough that it would be worth giving up other spending priorities, and Beyerstein suggests that Democrats had few other options. It's a tough case.UPDATE: On the negative side of the ledger, Prof. B. makes a good point about the funding implications: the bad funding in this case will go largely to constituencies who will then be able to push policy in a bad direction in the future. --Scott Lemieux
