More tales from the right-wing weenie wars!
From the front lines of my home state:
The day’s guest instructor had spiked blond hair, tight black jeans and a propensity for street slang. “You have been lied to, lied to by the media, lied to by celebrities,” Ed Ainsworth told the 120 squirming eighth-graders at Smylie Wilson Junior High School. “Will this condom protect your heart?” he asked, flashing a glossy Trojan ad on a giant screen. “Will this condom protect your reputation? Go ahead and use a condom. You’ll still be known as a slut.”
THIS IS SEX EDUCATION, Texas-style, where the only safe sex taught since 1995 is no sex outside marriage. That is when George W. Bush, who was then governor, signed a law making Texas the third state requiring schools to follow an abstinence-only sex education curriculum.
According to the article, the condom-hating instructor is giving his lesson in Lubbock, which leads TX in the rate of teen pregnancies (scroll down a bit to see the article). Nationally, numbers for teen pregnancies were last available in 1996 (one year after then Governor Bush enacted the abstinence only sex education policy in Texas). At that time Texas ranked 5th in the nation in teen pregnancies (chart at bottom). The MSNBC article claims that:
since the abstinence-only curriculum began in 1995, teen pregnancy rates have fallen in Texas generally — and Lubbock County specifically — but not as dramatically as for the nation as a whole.
In 1996, the last year for which national figures are available, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate was 38 out of every 1,000 girls; Texas’s rate was 40 per 1,000 and Lubbock County’s was 43. In subsequent years, as the national and state rates inched steadily downward, Lubbock’s figures fluctuated.
By 2000, the statewide teen pregnancy rate had dropped to 33 per 1,000; Lubbock County reported a rate of 42.4, said Jane Tustin, health services coordinator for the Lubbock Independent School District.
While abstinence-only had arguably done little to lower teen pregnancy rates, it has been successful in one arena. Since the 1995 enactment of Bush’s abstinence-only policy, STD transmission has soared in Lubbock county:
Over the last decade, as rates for gonorrhea and chlamydia have fallen nationally, Lubbock County has confronted an epidemic. In 2000, fewer than 150 cases of gonorrhea were reported nationally for every 100,000 people. Lubbock County reported double that, with the highest number of cases in people between the ages of 15 and 20.
The kids in Lubbock explain how the program has failed them to stop having sex and has warped their idea of what sex is:
We’ve got a lot of kids for whom the norm is to be a high school dropout and pregnant well before she is 18,” said Eric Benson, who coordinates HIV programs in the Lubbock area for the Texas Department of Health. “We have instances where a girl has her first child at 15, becomes a grandmother by the time she is 30 and a great-grandmother at age 45.”
Benson’s observations are based partly on experience: Fifteen years ago, at age 19, he fathered a child. “I got my sex ed from three sources-my peers, the media and my own research,” he said.
Many teenagers said that with the limits on teaching, and with parents who are uncomfortable discussing sex in detail, they learn much of what they know from experience. Some young women here, under the mistaken belief that they can get pregnant through oral sex, refer to their children as “spit babies.”
“I learned the hard way,” said Jennifer Villarreal, 19, who gave birth two years ago. “You can continue to talk about abstinence, but kids are curious and they will experiment.”
Even teenagers who have taken a virginity pledge see a community in which sexual activity — often risky, promiscuous behavior — is a routine part of growing up.
“Why so much sex in Lubbock?” said Shelby Knox, 16, who initiated the student effort to change the Lubbock curriculum. “There’s nothing to do. You can only go to the movies so many times on Friday night.”
So why am I harping so much on Lubbock County, TX? Well, because if President Bush has his way, the situation in Lubbock could be the norm throughout the US. Our president wants to make abstinence-only sex education the policy nationwide.
Now, I agree that teaching abstinence to teens is a good thing, and that complete abstinence (”complete” meaning sexual contact in all its forms) is the only 100 percent effective way of stopping pregnancy and transmission. What I don’t agree with are these right-wing religious fanatics imposing their moraily, fighting condom use, and limiting health information to public school students simply because they find sex so dirty and sinful. The truth of the matter is that all the bible-thumping and scare tactics in the world are not going to stop kids from having sex. As squeamish as these people are about tallywhackers and hoo-hoos they someday have to realize the simple fact that sex is natural and the desire to engage in it is biologically driven. If they don’t, and they get their way to abolish real sex education in schools (because parents certainly aren’t educating their children), we may end up with a teenage STD epidemic and a nationwide increase in teenage cases of HIV and AIDS.
Sometimes I get the feeling that the certain members of the Christian right are more concerned with policing the morals of “God’s children” than with protecting their lives.
