Abstinence for adults

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

Yet recently published guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services encourage state health officials to use part of their Abstinence Education Program grants to dissuade single 20-somethings from having sex.

Critics charge that the government's $170 million abstinence-only program fails even its intended audience of school-age youngsters. Various studies of abstinence education show mixed results. Some some studies show no reduction in sexually transmitted disease or unintended pregnancies. Comprehensive sex education, which includes information about birth control and protection against sexually transmitted diseases, delivers consistently superior outcomes, research shows.

There is no reason to believe that efforts to convince adults to refrain from having sex outside of marriage would succeed. What little success the effort brought would hardly justify the millions that would be directed toward such folly.

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In addition to being just plain fucking stupid, this whole abstinence-for-adults propaganda push reeks of First Amendment violation. Given that the statistical data show, again and again, that "abstinence based" sex education is ineffective, one must necessarily wonder why the hell the right wing keeps pushing it. The obvious answer is that conservatives simply believe that there should be no sex outside of marriage: again obviously, the reason they believe this is due to religious convictions. Don't count on any of these sex-obsessed right-wingers admiting it, but the whole abstinence movement is about pushing religious values on people who don't want them. And because they're using government money to essentially force religion on Americans, they stand in utter violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause. In short, "abstinence based" sex ed is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

There's also the fact that telling twenty-somethings that they're too immature to have sex is downright insulting.

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