Friday, April 25, 2008

$1.3 Billion Down Your Daughter's Fallopian Tubes

How Tony Perkins' Obstinacy Costs the Taxpayer in Money...and LIVES

Sorry about the silly title, but it's exactly the kind of approach Tony Perkins of Family Research Council (the official mouthpiece and lobbying entity of James Dobson's Focus on the Family) would take.

From Matthew Blake: Abstinence Only Endures (Washington Independent)

A congressional hearing Wednesday by the House oversight committee promised to "assess the evidence" on abstinence-only sex education.

That evidence includes two independent reports that abstinence-only programs have no effect on teenage sexual activity and do not meet a basic scientific standard. These studies have led to a growing momentum in Congress to eliminate abstinence-only funding.

But instead of analyzing these studies, a four-hour hearing by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform rarely moved beyond championing the value of pre-marital abstinence. The discussion played into the central tenant of abstinence-only education: only abstinence, not condoms or contraception, can prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Since 1997, such obstinence for abstinence has cost us $1.3 billion in programs THAT DON'T WORK!!

Of course, this is how Tony Perkins sees it all:

(From the official FRC website) Tony Perkins released the following statement criticizing Congressman Henry Waxman's biased abstinence education hearing today before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "Chairman Henry Waxman's hostility to abstinence education, heedless of studies showing positive outcomes, is exhibited by this biased hearing."

Let's look at reality:

  • Would any teenager ever give up the thought of sex?
  • Did you?
  • Besides the movie, when's the last time you even heard of a 40 year-old virgin? A twenty year-old virgin? A Virgin? (outside the Bible, of course, and Islam's version of heaven)
  • After you've had sex for the first time, imagine being stuck with that person - for life!
  • Have parents (or Bible study classes) ever given kids the accurate "facts of life"?
  • The only people who warn against sex are the ones who've never had it as much as they really want.
  • "Abstinence Only" education either scares kids to point of psychosis or makes sex alluring simply by telling kids what they CAN'T have.
Last year, Perkins protested that U.S. government-funded AIDS education in Thailand was giving condoms to prostitutes. When's the last time you told a hooker to practice abstinence? She'll only retort "OK, if that's your scene, how much do I get for NOT doing it?" I know it sounds grotesque, but maybe Perkins needs a dead Thai prostitute on his doorstep.



Seriously - Would you trust a guy who always looks like he puts depilatories on his face for that choirboy look?