Monday, April 09, 2007
Teaching Fish to Ride Bicycles
"There are kids who don't want to know how to put on a condom, because they don't want to have sex," says Leslee Unruh, president and chief executive of the South Dakota-based National Abstinence Clearinghouse. "So why can't kids who want to abstain have equal time, funding, and education in the classroom as kids who are having sex?"
Unruh is alarmed because six states -- Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana, and New Jersey -- have turned down, or plan to turn down, millions of dollars in abstinence only sex education grants from the federal government because they are ineffective and overly restrictive.
So, it's not exactly equal time we're talking about here. It's breaking up the exclusive franchise granted to abstinence only sex education by the Bush administration and the Republican party.
Why would children who don't want to have sex, who already want to abstain, as Unruh puts it, need more abstinence drummed into their heads?
Well, how else would the Bush administration fund its allies on the religious right? How else would organizations of the religious right, such as Unruh's Abstinence Clearinghouse, get access to public school children in order to indoctrinate them into the curious sexual taboos of fundamentalist Christianity?
Unruh is alarmed because six states -- Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana, and New Jersey -- have turned down, or plan to turn down, millions of dollars in abstinence only sex education grants from the federal government because they are ineffective and overly restrictive.
So, it's not exactly equal time we're talking about here. It's breaking up the exclusive franchise granted to abstinence only sex education by the Bush administration and the Republican party.
Why would children who don't want to have sex, who already want to abstain, as Unruh puts it, need more abstinence drummed into their heads?
Well, how else would the Bush administration fund its allies on the religious right? How else would organizations of the religious right, such as Unruh's Abstinence Clearinghouse, get access to public school children in order to indoctrinate them into the curious sexual taboos of fundamentalist Christianity?
