ACLU targets abstinence-only programs

[Believer]

ACLU targets abstinence-only programs

By Cheryl Wetzstein
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published September 22, 2005

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday began a campaign to urge officials in 18 states to reject abstinence-only sex-education programs.
Many abstinence programs contain false or misleading information, discriminate against homosexual youth and promote religion, ACLU leaders said, citing a December report issued by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat.
The effort began as Maine announced that it had become the third state to reject federal abstinence-education funding, because of new rules that conflict with state policy.
Maine officials said this week that they will forgo a grant offered through the 1996 welfare-reform law because it must be used for abstinence programs and because they prefer comprehensive sex education. They used the grants for abstinence ad campaigns before the rules change.
"This money is more harmful than it is good," Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of Maine's Bureau of Health, told the Portland Press Herald. "You can't talk about comprehensive reproductive information."
She said Maine didn't take $165,000 in Title V abstinence grants offered in fiscal 2005 and would not take the $161,000 that becomes available Oct. 1 for fiscal 2006. Pennsylvania and California also have rejected the grants.
"Maine likes to be in the lead in a lot of things, and I think this is one of these times when we have," Lynn Kippax, press secretary for Maine Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, said yesterday.
Abstinence-only programs define abstinence as "avoiding all genital contact and sexual stimulation" and teach teens how to set boundaries and practice self-control, said Libby Gray Macke, director of Project Reality in Glenview, Ill.
In contrast, comprehensive sex programs teach a "complete range" of behaviors, including oral sex and mutual masturbation, as alternatives to intercourse, she said. However, these behaviors put teens at risk for sexually transmitted diseases.
The states targeted by the ACLU are Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Pennsylvania and California do not accept Title V abstinence funds, but last year, organizations in the two states received more than $10 million from other federal abstinence funds, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
Meanwhile, abstinence supporters are hoping Congress soon will boost abstinence funding to a record $206 million, as proposed by the Bush administration.
They also are criticizing comprehensive-sex advocates for helping push the teen oral-sex rate to higher than 50 percent.

Many abstinence programs contain false or misleading information, discriminate against homosexual youth and promote religion...

Promote religion? I think not. Of course it always comes to the ACLU, the organization that promotes dumb ideas and eliminates smart ideas, one of their favorites is religion, because to them, religion is naturally wrong.

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

[LittleShepherd]

The ACLU is anything but an advocate of civil liberties. The only reason they're opposed to abstinence programs is that a lot of the people behind the programs happen to be Christian. It has nothing to do with the merits(or lack thereof) of the programs themselves.

We've been teaching comprehensive sexual education for years. We've offered condoms and other birth control methods, and taught teens the proper way to use them. We've done it the ACLU's way for a long time, and it's obvious that they're way simply isn't working. Teen STD and pregnancy rates are at an all-time high. All comprehensive sex-ed programs do is send the message "You're nothing but a raging ball of hormones. We don't have any hope of your being able to exercise any self-control. But don't worry; condoms will solve all your problems...even though the protection they provide against STDs and pregnancy(in the long run) is next to worthless, as has been proven time after time."

Now we have a program that says "You're more than just hormones. We believe you can practice self-control, and we expect you to do so. Oh, we'll talk about birth control, but we're not going to wrap it up in a pretty little package that tells you the condom is some wonderful cure-all. We're going to give you the facts about the condom's high rate of failure, as well as the facts concerning its uselessness against most STDs. Sure they're not pretty, but we're not going to shield you in some hope that if we close our eyes, the problem might not actually exist."

And ACLU wants to shut it down, and doom yet another generation of kids to believing lies about condoms and other birth control, as well as the message that they're worthless, hopeless, and basically a pile of hormones that can't be controlled. It's the ACLU, though, so I'm not surprised.