Washington State has once again declined a chance to take a stand for sexual literacy by not acting on the half dozen bills in the legislature to require sex education. What is required, if sex ed is taught at all, is a push for abstinence. Anything else is up to the individual school districts.
That means that districts which teach anything at all must preach that those disgusting naughty bits must be saved as a blessed gift for your spouse, but are not required to give information on birth control, either inside of or outside of marriage. And if they teach birth control at all, it’s not required to be medically accurate. While health classes will educate on hand washing to avoid colds, they don’t have to give kids information that could save their lives.
Instead, the state is sponsoring an tv and billboard advertising campaign called No Sex, No Problems, run by Department of Health Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Coordinator Paj Nandi, which touts abstinence as the method to prevent STDs and pregnancy.
From the No Sex No Problems website:
DOH funding for this program is provided by the Administration for Children and Families under the US Department of Health and Human Services. Funding for this program does not endorse information beyond the scope of the federal Abstinence Education definition.
How’s that for a use of tax dollars.
The website also announces in scary large type that 590 high school students in Washington contracted gonorrhea in 2004, 5,957 teens reported contracting Chlamydia and that 11,404 Washington girls between the ages of 10-19 got pregnant. That’s out of approximately 500,000 students in grades 6-12. That’s after abstinence only education. That doesn’t sound to me as if the campaign is working.
The information available to adults isn’t any better. From the WA Department of Health website, the plan to reduce STD rates states: “Risk Reduction: Behavioral risk reduction is carried out through general educational materials distributed throughout the state. Annually over 300,000 language and education level appropriate materials are distributed. These focus on abstinence, delay of sexual activity and monogamy as well as individual diseases and conditions. STD Program helps people make healthy choices by explaining the kinds of behavior that increase risk of STD infection.
So how are adults supposed to education their kids, when the information available to them is limited to abstinence and monogamy?
Yet our legislators continue to stick their heads in the sand.
When you stick your head in the sand, your ass is up in the air. That must be what they’re thinking with.