Sexual revolutionaries team up in Kentucky to terminate abstinence education, suggesting that Bristol Palin is their 'poster child'
-- From "No more abstinence education?" by Mary Meehan, Lexington Hearld-Leader 9/16/08
A coalition of six organizations is calling for Kentucky health departments to reject $820,000 in federal money spent annually to promote saving sex for marriage, saying that abstinence education is not the answer for youth.
The coalition's plea comes at a time when teen sex is in the news, with a vice presidential candidate's pregnant teen daughter on stage at the recent Republican National Convention and and pop star purity rings being mocked at the Video Music Awards last week.
The group, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood of Kentucky, supports what it terms "medically accurate sexual education," which includes information about contraceptives. The group says abstinence programs are fear-based, promote gender stereotypes and aren't effective.
The federal dollars come with the condition that only abstinence be taught. And Greg Williams, director of Heritage of Kentucky, a Lexington-based non-profit focused on abstinence education, argues that according to his math, when you add up all the federal dollars that go to AIDS prevention programs and other health-related programs that promote contraception, the money spent on abstinence programs is relatively small.
A single point of agreement is that more teens are contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Both sides use terms like "horrific" to describe transmission rates, as recently reported by the CDC, that indicate that 26 percent of young women ages 14 to 19 have at least one sexually transmitted diseases. That's 3.2 million girls. And each side blames the other's education method for these numbers.
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