Sex, Sex, Sex, Sex
What is this world coming to? Well, this country, at least. I’m watching 60 Minutes and they’re discussing sex education in America. Thanks to the Bush administration, school’s will only receive funding to teach abstinence-only methods. In fact, teens in some places (apparently, mostly in the south) are being taught sex-education by some of Bush’s faith-based initiatives (another thing I’m against).
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s perfectly appropriate to teach people to abstain from sex. Absolutely. I think all sex-education should encourage people to wait and not cave-in to peer pressure. However, the information that’s being manipulated and presented to the students is only going to make things worse:
1 – 88% of students signing abstinence pledges are breaking those pledges and having sex (based on a study of 20,000 teenagers that had attended such programs). Meanwhile, those 17,600 students are having sex without having been taught how to prevent diseases.
2 – Teachers are not allowed to promote condom use. In fact, teachers can only discuss condoms by saying that they have a 14% failure rate. They aren’t allowed to word it as “condoms have an 86% effective rate”. They’re required to present it in the negative only. Also noteworthy is that the effectiveness rate of condoms is apparently 99% “if used properly” and only 86% if used improperly (meaning people uneducated about how to use them are more likely to have failure).
3 – Ironically, I’ve read in the past few weeks (and seen on another news show) that Texas (Bush’s own state) has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. Not surprisingly, the article I read discussed how STD rates among teens are also highest in Texas.
4 – But what scared me most was when Ed Bradley asked one of the faith-based inititative speakers whether he would advise a teen to use a condom if he/she wasn’t going to sign the abstinence pledge. Instead, the man said “let me answer it simply”, and went on to say that if his own 16 year old daugher was going to have sex, he wouldn’t tell her to use a condom!!!!!! That scares me. He said that using a condom would not protect her sexually or from the “emotional damage” sex will cause.
And that’s what prompted me to start blogging and ranting. This mentality is just downright scary. Are the people making these policies (about who gets funding and how condoms can’t be discussed) so clueless? Ironically, looking at www.teenpregnancy.org, I see that of the 10 states with the higest rates of teen pregnancy, 9 are considered “conservative” or red states (Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Georgia, N. Carolina, Arkansas).
Apparently, this abstinence only method isn’t working!
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Of course they want to breed Karl.
It makes more of them…….
Karl for Kongress! Wait – did I spell that wrong? Sorry, it’s just that my spelling classes were taught by faith-based-initiative speakers. Then again, they support the kind of people who say Nuke-yoo-ler. (And whose daughters and nieces appear to have substance abuse problems.)
Yeah though. I think abstinence is the smartest move for these youngsters but this Down With Protecting Yourself mentality has got to go.