With sex education, 'just don't do it' just won't cut it
December 08

By Tom Teepen, Austin American-Statesman

The gods of irony are dancing again. Even as the movie "Kinsey" turns up

theaters to reminds us of the social shock that greeted the first
comprehensive
scientific survey of sexual behavior in 1948, your federal government is
trying
to stuff the sex genie back into the bottle. The more things change, the
more .
. .

The film traces the pioneering work of the Indiana University - read:
heartland
- scientist Alfred Kinsey, whose nationwide survey whisked a thick cover

hypocrisy off of sexual matters. Contrary to the staid surface of the

and
despite legally-backed sexual repression, it turned out that premarital

extramarital sex, plus an array of practices at the time labeled deviant,
were
in fact widespread.

The study excited a veritable industry of denunciation and debunking whose
remnant figures are still fussing on the margins, some even demanding a
congressional investigation of Kinsey, who has been dead for 48 years. But
for
all the controversy, Kinsey, in the end, did finally free the issues of

from
misinformation and the mire of wishful thinking, didn't he?

Not exactly. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., shows in a new report that
abstinence-only sex education, an enthusiasm of President Bush and
congressional
Republicans, often tutors students in gross misinformation.

Abstinence-only courses indoctrinate young people against sex until
marriage and
limit birth-control information to its failures. This is, frankly, a silly
undertaking - silly because it is hopeless. Puberty is hitting a year or
two
earlier than it did a century ago, and marriage nowadays usually waits
until
well into the 20s. A policy promoting celibacy for a stretch of a dozen
years or
more, and at an age when the hormones are at their hottest, is nonsense.

And indeed a Columbia University study found that while teens who take
virginity
pledges may wait a little longer to become sexually active than other

88
percent fall off the wagon. When they do, they are less likely to use
protection
than students who have had comprehensive sex eduction.

Its advocates argue that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid

or
sexual disease. Well, sure. But, then, never getting into a vehicle is the
only
certain way to avoid a car crash, and not many are going to do that,
either.

Youthful promiscuity is a problem, but the effective answers lie with
prudence,
good judgment and knowledge - all teachable.

Instead, as Waxman has found, students in some abstinence courses are told
that
touching another person's genitals can cause pregnancy, that abortion

leads to sterility, that the AID virus can be spread by tears and sweat.
Condoms
are misrepresented as next to useless in preventing the spread of sexually
transmitted diseases.

This isn't sex education. It's anti-sex education, trafficking in shame

dread and sometimes further freighted with anti-abortion and pre-feminist
cant.
Even so, Congress has just hiked abstinence-only education by $30 million,
even
as it was cutting the National Science Foundation, our basic research
engine, by
$105 million.

And compounding futility with farce, a national abstinence-only advocacy
group
is boosting the crusade with a T-shirt that reads "Touch your dog, not

date."

Maybe Kinsey would understand.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/12/8teepen_edit.html

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