SEX EDUCATORS UNDER FIRE

The state of Texas, where I live, is an abstinence-only sex education state. That is, by law, all public schools in Texas must teach sex education from a perspective that regards refraining from sex until marriage as the highest of sexual values. Apart from the obvious fact that this approach leaves gay and lesbian students quite literally out in the cold (gay marriages in Texas, like in many other states, are against the law), the "abstinence based" approach takes practical sexuality education into the realm of religious morality. This is clearly incompatible with the first amendment's establishment clause. This also leads to some downright dangerous practices: emphasis on condom failures tends to make students less likely to use them; abortion is not an option. Texas sex ed is increasing HIV infection and teenage pregnancy rates, not reducing them.

Sadly, this seems to be a national trend. The religious right long ago infiltrated numerous local school boards; the fundamentalists have made vast gains in favorable representation in the corporate media. Weird, blind puritanism is on the rise throughout the land.

Here is a good article from the Nation originally appearing about a year ago that details the recent Judith Levine controversy and gives a lot of background info:

Still, I think Levine would be pilloried by Dr. Laura and her ilk even without the priest scandal and even if she had ignored the subject of sex across the age divide. For the pleasure principle she enunciates challenges the twenty-five-year-old organizing strategy of the right. Ever since Anita Bryant first demonstrated that a power base could be built by attacking homosexuals, the right has exploited real anxieties about sex, love and family to constrain the liberatory spirit, whether expressed by sexual preference, divorce, abortion, contraception, women's freedom or teen sex. This has not managed to send queers back to the closet, lower divorce rates or "protect the children." American teenagers have about four times the pregnancy rate of teens in Western Europe. Those in a program of "abstinence only" education still have sex and are about half as likely to protect themselves than kids who've received broad sex information. Even with abortion rights severely curtailed, US teenagers have abortions at about the rate they did just after Roe v. Wade. One in four has had a sexually transmitted disease; one an hour is infected with HIV; and, not incidentally, among American children one in six is poor. That notwithstanding, the sex panic strategy has succeeded in the only way it had to: creating a movement, with all the institutions, political power, lawmaking capability, grassroots presence and funding that implies, to advance an agenda for everything from global dominance to bedroom snooping. Levine's critics are all part of that project, and since she butts against it almost from the opening pages of her book, they are striking back.

Here is an article about a university sex educator being both honored by colleagues and reviled by politicians:

State Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, has accused Dailey of showing videos that are obscene under Kansas law. She also has accused him of obscenity and of mistreating students in the undergraduate class on sexuality.

It's ironic: despite the ever increasing pornogrification of MTV pop stars and reality television, America is suffering an old fashioned puritanical repression. The post-modern era is so contradictory...

UPDATE
Parents group protests author's speaking event

I just read this in the Houston Chronicle:

"Practically every page is an obscene attack on the innocence of my daughter and all other children," said Bailey, a Cypress-Fairbanks district resident.

The books show frontal nudity in drawings and mention homosexuality.

"Teen suicide and murders against gays are high, yet gay people are in our workplace, churches, basically everywhere," Harris said. "There's no way to write a book on sexuality without talking about homosexuality."

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