Leslie Unruh is CREEPY. Also, "brain research"? Um, yeah.

I know! She definitely has that lobotomized-chic thing going on.

As the Planned Parenthood rep said in the video, abstinence-only "education" is all about teaching values and not facts. The US is such a large and diverse area -- I don't know why sex educators (and "educators") don't just teach some real facts and then encourage students (or assign them homework) to go home and ask their parents about their particular culture's value system regarding sexuality. The Victorian squeamishness about sexuality is what keeps all these problems happening again and again.

I'm from Kentucky and went to Catholic school, and I think it's ridiculous that my Catholic school taught comprehensive sex education, including contraceptives and condoms, in a less biased way than does the public school system here. It's revolting.

I don't think Unruh has a very good relationship with reality. To quote her directly from the film when a man said that people will have sex no matter what they are taught: "I keep hearing that over and over and over, 'people are going to have sex'...in reality, no, in reality they're NOT going to have sex."

Because people in reality don't have sex. Okaaaaay...

*Sigh* It's kind of funny to me that now that women are waiting longer and longer to get married (or are ditching the institution alltogether) we suddenly are seeing programs spring up relegating sex to the confines of marriage. So if people don't get married, does that mean that they should never have sex? That leaves a lot of GLBT people out in the cold, but I suppose that's just a happy by-product of abstinence only ed.

I suppose we have to have at least ONE valid reason to marry, right? Don't get married for love or committment--if you're even allowed to marry at all--get married because you want to get LAID!

That video was great and inspired me to go track down the sex ed policies for my child's school distirct. Turns out that he was supposed to get 5 hours of aids/hiv education starting this year. It's almost the end of the school year and it hasn't happened yet. Looks like a certain principal is getting a grouchy email today.

I was intrigued to note the difference between offices. The abstinence only people had perfectly clean desks, no sign of papers, and there were two shots that showed a completely blank computer screen in the background (one woman even "worked" on that computer!), while the pro-education people (especiall the public health officials) had desks overflowing with paperwork, files, etc., and actual computer programs running.

I find that fascinating.

"get married because you want to get LAID!"

For real -- this is one of the huge reasons I'm against "abstinence only" that I don't think gets enough attention -- it encourages students to conflate the sexual urge with long-term-soulmate-forever love, which is already something that teenagers have so much trouble working out... that can't lead to anywhere good.

Also, by the way, I'm disturbed that Pennsylvania is listed as one of only three states refusing funding for abstinence only education -- having been in a public PA high school not all that long ago (5 years?) I can say that although we were allowed to mention condoms, it's not as if the classes were at all comprehensive, and everyone pretty much knew that the whole thing was bullshit anyway.

I think of the boys I dated when I was 16 (allllll those years ago...), and remembering that I was horny enough to marry any of them just to get in their pants. What a disasterous thing that would have been.

I think it's beyond unreasonable to expect people to wait until they're in their late twenties/early thirties to have sex when sex is thrown in their faces on every imaginable media outlet every day. I also think it's unreasonable to expect people in their teens and early twenties (for the most part) to make good life-partner choices.

We live in a sexed-up society, but think our hormone-crazed kids are really going to say "no" to sex? What a joke.

My school had abstinence only education and I was one of maybe 40 out of 200 kids that didn't end up pregnant or with an STD. Since my mom was too unsure or shy to talk to me about sex, I ended up learning about condoms and STDs from MTV. Thank God we had cable.

sex is bad and condoms don't work

Well, I can’t support that, and I hope my tax dollars aren’t being spent to that effect. On the other hand, If one has it in their head that one can promote a standard of sexual restraint, that this standard is a positive human good and children and adults thrive under it…well, its hard to argue with that. The only other position seems to be that sex is meaningless, young people are cant control themselves, and only lessons in hygiene are appropriate. Maybe thinking people could split the difference?

It's apparent how deeply capitalism has soaked our society when we apply the "scarcity raises value" maxim to something as vital as sex, even as we condemn out and out prostitution! If they're going to teach abstinence they need to have the fortitude to teach the consequences of sexual restrain enforced by internalized messages of "the right thing to do." Myself, for instance, I was raised with strictly abstinence-only mores. Thank God my private school taught comprehensive sexual education, but it was too little too late for me. Rather than becoming an STD statistic, I burned with shame long before I had the barest inkling of sexual desire. Not only was I torn apart by my first, and still only, relationship, my anxiety put him through the ringer with me. While I longed to have sex, I hated myself for it, I said we would and then I took it back. We did everything but, and not entirely safely. But even with marriage and official sanction, it's impossible to tune those messages out. Years later, it takes almost an hour of concentrated effort for me to orgasm and even then, I usually don't. Despite the fact that I enjoy sex on some level, I never initiate it and I'm hardly "present" when we're there. I've wanted a vibrator for years so that I could, maybe, work through my anxiety about not cumming fast enough, but can't seem to get one. Abstinence imparts no meaning to sex, it imparts shame. If sex has meaning besides pleasure, it's love that generally gives it that meaning, but there are so many people with such diverse philosophies, I can't imagine we need to agree on one concept that gives meaning to sex, much less attempt to teach that there is only one true route to meaning in sex.

By all means, forget teaching abstinence, instead teach young people that their sexuality is their *own* and not some gift to give to person in the right place and the right time, however you define that condition. Teach them they have the right to their autonomy, that their sexuality is never owed to anyone else, then give them tools to learn about their sexuality on their own. Tell them it's all right to have sex when and how they want to, sooner or later. This is not an issue of teaching youths that we think they can't control themselves, it's an issue of our claiming the youth can't control themselves because we can't control them sufficiently to compel the behavior we want from them!

Next time someone tells me abstinence is hard to argue against, they ought to take a closer look at the people who bought too far into the conservative abstinence message. There are some in every church. The aging bachelors and bachelorettes who may want it with all their hearts, but believed too deeply when they were told sex was sinful. The sexless newlyweds. I've seen them, they've been in my family, one lives with us, and I've been to many many churches in my lifetime. These folks desperate to get back into Eden, the crowd pushing this message has spraypainted some concrete playground green and claimed it was the real thing.

And if I'm really hopping mad about this, I sincerely apologize.

"I think it's beyond unreasonable to expect people to wait until they're in their late twenties/early thirties to have sex when sex is thrown in their faces on every imaginable media outlet every day."

You've indentified the problem; what is the solution? Unconditional surrender is a repugnant choice, but it seems to be the popular one in these parts.

Fitz, you're creating a false choice here. Just like it was made clear on the thread at Feministe a few weeks ago, I'll say again: sexual freedom is not the freedom to be an asshole. "Sexual restraint" is a pretty relative term and there's no reason to prescribe specific behavioral controls for sex when respect, communication, and kindness are equally important in all areas of life, including sex.

Abstinence-only education only mentions contraception in the light of failure rates, and pushes all sorts of dubious "facts" about how having sex will make everyone hate you and cause you to commit suicide. Even comprehensive sex education does put emphasis on abstinence, though it does refrain from negatively judging kids who don't have the kind of "restraint" that you'd like to encourage - whatever that might be. There are lots of reasons to encourage kids to keep it in their pants unless they're absolutely sure that they want to become sexually active, but portraying sexually active kids as irresponsible or unrestrained is the sort of moralizing that ends up keeping kids from telling their doctors that they're having sex, or asking their parents to take them in to get some birth control pills. Demonstrating how to apply our normal moral standards to our sex lives has a place in sex education (obtain consent, keep communication open, and be honest), but any kind of formula that shows the number of people you sleep with as proportional to your moral decay, or other really baseless judgement of sex that's not expressly advocated by James Dobson himself - that's taking it too far.

Yeah, i know sarah rodriguez. i go to albuquerque high. anyway, the abstinence clearinghouse lady was a nutjob. i particularly enjoyed the way that she is like the CIA. i almost died i was laughing so hard. and when she argued that no one is gonna have sex before marriage, cuz her limo driver told her that he won't. LMAO!!!!

"Well, I can’t support that, and I hope my tax dollars aren’t being spent to that effect."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but your tax dollars are in fact going to this effort.

"Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis centers have received federal grants that often doubled or tripled their annual budgets, allowing them to branch out and hire staff, especially for abstinence education.

The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky., a small outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the belief in the sanctity of human life, primarily as it relates to the protection of the unborn," operated on an annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it raised from an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing it to hire staff and expand.

In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center, where the staff believes "without reservation or qualification that the Scriptures teach that human life begins at conception," had revenue of $81,621 and could pay Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. Two years later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.

Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and other programs, according to a Post review of federal records." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101723_pf.html

here are a couple other links:

http://www.rhtp.org/news/articles/20041022.asp

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032206C.shtml

You can also read about my own controversy here in California which mirrors the Albuquerque story exactly.

http://www.diablomag.com/home/show_story/64/