You just can’t do it.
Whatever your morality is, don’t try to legislate it. Please. It just doesn’t work to enforce a behavior as a shortcut to promoting (without hypocrisy) the moral and ethical judgments behind it. It just doesn’t work.
The news for the Bush Adminstration’s abstinence-only policies just seems to be getting worse, some might liken it to a swiftly sinking boat or ship.
So a burial at sea is appropriate, and by releasing the latest federal report on abstinence-only, Impacts for Title V. Section 510, Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report, from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. late on a Friday, that is exactly what the Bushies are doing.
“After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions,” said James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth.
“The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that’s not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics”.
You didn’t learn it during Prohibition, are you going to learn it now?
On a call yesterday organized by the Abstinence Clearinghouse, abstinence-only proponents were clearly rocked by the potentially ruinous news in the report. High profile abstinence-only advocate, Robert Rector, led the preemptive damage-control planning. He outlined several strategies the abstinence-only movement could use to rationalize the findings in the report saying, “The other spin I think is very important is not [program] effectiveness, but rather the values that are being taught,” Rector said. Whether or not these programs work is a “bogus issue,” Rector continued.
The blind arrogance required to say that whether it works or not is unimportant leaves me speechless. I suppose learning it is something we can’t expect for this time, either.
Chinchillas to C&L.
