SUDDENLY THE ABSTINENCE-ONLY MOVEMENT CARES ABOUT FACTS? Sometimes I give anti-choicers too much credit. This week, when articles started cropping up on pro-fetus websites about how a government study showed comprehensive sex ed programs disseminate false information, I was actually kind of concerned. After all, the whole "false information about condoms" thing is the abstinence-only folks' area of expertise -- not ours. So I wasn't exactly surprised when the Washington Post reported yesterday that the research was conducted by two right-wing organizations -- the Sagamore Institute (which has close ties to Bush's faith-based initiatives office and the Hudson Institute) and the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (remember them? they "train" med students to promote abstinence-only). It's shocking, I know, that Republicans would ask pro-abstinence-only groups to evaluate the comprehensive sex-ed programs they oppose.
The analysis -- requested two years ago by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), both conservative Republicans -- concluded that nine widely used curricula contained misleading statements about condom failure, focused too little on abstinence and were only marginally successful in persuading young people to use condoms or, better yet, to delay having sex.
Coburn and Santorum? No shocker there. Let's say up front that, for all the anti-sex crowd's crowing over the findings, eight of the nine programs evaluated contained NO misinformation about condoms. So already we've got a better track record than the abstinence-only crowd. Doesn't mean the evaluated curricula were perfect, though. WaPo summarizes:
