The U.S. has spent $1.5 billion on abstinence-only sex education programs. Seventeen states, responding to research concluding abstinence-only doesn't work, have rejected the federal dollars associated with these programs so they can pursue reality-based comprehensive sex-ed. After all, over 9 out of 10 Americans have premarital sex -- and that number has been fairly constant throughout the twentieth century, even before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
That's the evidence-backed, medically and sociologically sound truth. But abstinence hawks aren't accepting it. Instead, they are launching "Parents for Truth," a $1 million national campaign aimed at pressuring school districts and states to accept the Bush administration's federal funds for abstinence-only. A video created by the National Abstinence Education Associate, which is leading the campaign, is completely deceiving. It shows a mom walking into a huge suburban kitchen after work, where her young teen daughter is doing homework at the table. Mom gets a phone call from another mother, who's enraged over a sex-ed program called "Be Proud! Be Responsible!" A page of the program's text book is shown on which "taking a shower together" is called a "green light" sexual behavior.
Be Proud! Be Responsible! is a real curriculum -- an HIV/AIDS prevention program targeted toward inner city, African American youth. It is highly unlikely any upper middle class suburban school is using this text. Abstinence is actually an important element of Be Proud! And by "green light," the textbook means that a certain intimate activity will not spread HIV. Be Proud! works well. Its participants are more likely to abstain from intercourse and more likely to use a condom when they do have sex.
The Parents for Truth campaign is typical of the abstinence-only movement in that it fails to accept how different populations of kids may need different kinds of sex-ed. The campaign also riles parents up about curricula that talk frankly about sex, without sharing with them a critical truth: The vast, overwhelming majority of Americans have sex out of wedlock. Your child will almost certainly become one of them, if he or she hasn't already. Do you want her to be ignorant, or do you want her to be safe?
--Dana Goldstein
