Big surprise! Abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work.
Big surprise! It's a huge waste of money.
Big surprise! 4 billion years of evolution in making every living thing on this plant successful because of our collective ability to procreate beats out religiously motivated wishful thinking. Who could have possibly known? (Certainly not anyone who thinks that Jesus solves all your problems.)
Big surprise! It was all just a way for the religious right to get money from its shills in the government. Sadly, this blatant and obvious corruption at the expense of our youth will likely never be punished. I, for one, would like my tax money back on this one.
We've been saying this stuff all along, but nobody listens to us atheists. We're immoral.
Again, I have to note that what we're talking about here shouldn't be confused with "abstinence-only" sex education.
ReplyDeleteAbstinence-only policies are done at the school level and prohibit any sex education beyond the abstinence program.
The subject of these studies are congressionally-mandated programs designed to promote abstinence, regardless of any other sexual education the student receives.
So, while these programs only teach about abstinence, they aren't the only sex education the students receive.
The study lists the 4 programs and shows what other sex and health education these students received. Additionally some of these were voluntary electives - some even after school.
It's a huge waste of money, and we shouldn't have really needed to experiment with this in order to know that the effect could not justify the expense. These are the rough equivalent of purity pledges, rings, and other stuff that encourages students to promise to abstain until marriage.
I support abstinence education in conjunction with regular sex education - but we don't need these special programs.
These programs were, essentially an attempt to "beat" abstinence into the head of youngsters to see if it would stick - it didn't.
Let's encourage proper sex and health education that gives students all of the information, including abstinence - as a single program...rather than trying to progressively brain-wash them and hope that our brain-washing can force them to ignore the call of nature.
It's stupid.