Sex ed does not mean nailing your teacher

Dear Mr. Bass,

I was interested to read your perspective on the “REAL Act” in a column last week that appeared on WorldNetDaily. But I’m afraid I didn’t quite appreciate your sarcasm as intended. You sneered, “Apparently, offering children ‘the full picture’ involves showcasing abortion, contraceptives, risky behavior and deviant sexual lifestyles as healthy and ideal alternatives to abstinence and chastity. Similarly, cheating children with "half the story" means providing programs that encourage children to exhibit self-restraint by instructing them in the physical and emotional benefits of abstaining from sexual activity until marriage.”

First, I wonder if you were consciously overstating the proposed legislation or simply made an error. While I haven’t read the document, I doubt that even such evil people as liberals would suggest that “deviant” lifestyles or abortions are “healthy and ideal.”

Second, to willfully withhold information that could save lives is worse than “cheating” them -- it’s reckless. While no one disputes it is in many ways wise and safest to abstain until marriage, even the best-educated youths sometimes give in to their physical urges. Similarly, while we may hope that abortions are reduced or eliminated, they continue to exist.

I don’t believe that countries ought to be dominated by totalitarian Islamic fundamentalist regimes, though I sure hope they’re teaching kids about them in history class. And you and I may not believe in the same role of government, but I hope both points of view are being presented in government and civics classes. And they may not use aluminum bats in major league baseball, but maybe it’s OK if they talk about that during gym.
I’ve never been a proponent of ignorance as a tool for social control but I can see how it is useful when one’s goal is an agenda rather than the health of children. However, government actively underwrites education in America and thus public health must trump indoctrination of any kind. I hope that teachers warn against premarital sex and speak to the benefits of waiting, but I hope they place that information in a greater context of safety. Meanwhile, the appropriate place for highlighting the moral aspects of this issue remains the home.

Condoms won’t cease to exist by not talking about them in classrooms. This isn’t about some “miry morality,” it is about education based on facts, and it could not be more important than for topics of immediate and pressing impact on the lives of students. We ought to be incredulous that faced with a paucity of evidence indicating the effectiveness of abstinence-only education (e.g., this), an administration focused on cutting programs that can’t prove results is increasing funding for curricula with factual misrepresentations, such as those Rep. Waxman pointed out. You brushed aside Waxman’s “so-called” points (documented well here), chastising him for not bringing up some unspecified problems with comprehensive sexual education programs (I couldn’t even find a mention of anything like this using Google) – but perhaps worse still, for not mentioning the spending gap.

We should encourage those who are potentially sexually active to abstain for moral and health reasons, but the lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of abstinence-only education means we should not stop there. We cannot strive for improvement by ignoring reality. Please try to put aside the bitter partisan enmity when considering programs for which there is disputative scientific evidence and concentrate on ways that science, logic, and policy can combine to protect ourselves.