Unlike most of my blog posts, I did some research for this one by typing "sexual abstinence programs" into Google and wading through the 13 pages of studies and articles saying abstinence only education DOES NOT WORK until I finally hit on a pro-abstinence only page. It's something called the "Silver Ring Thing" and wouldn't you know it, they had an image gallery from their events. And in that image gallery? The picture of a dude in a Michael Meyer's mask hacking up wood with a chainsaw you see above. No shit. Check it out yourself at http://www.silverringthing.com/.
One would be hard pressed to imagine a scenario in a "concert" promoting sexual abstinence to teenagers where a dude would reenact a butchering from an iconic horror film. This is the best I could come up with:
Youth Leader: OK kids, kids, settle down. Let's imagine this box...OK...this box...is your purity. (kids cheer) Then imagine you let SEX (kids boo)...no, come on kids, let me finish. Imagine you let SEX into your life.
-Man in Michael Meyer mask comes out and chainsaws the shit out of the wooden box-
Youth Leader (over the chainsaw roar): Girls, your hymen will be wrecked for life! Boys, your diddle will rot off from an STD. And even if it doesn't, imagine what GOD will do to you if you have SEX!!!
-kids break into Pentecostal glee, being slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues and praying for God's salvation to come into the gym.
That's the best I could come up with. Sadly, while I can come up with that far fetched scenario, I cannot come up with one that would cause parents to actively lie to their kids, their teachers and themselves to promote something that hurts their kids. Yet, that's exactly what's happening when abstinence only education is pushed by parents, and in some spots in our grand old country, it's pushed really hard.
I received this alert from a board I'm on recently:
"The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign. The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.
"There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children," said Valerie Huber, the group ' s executive director."
Yes, powerful and evil special interest groups like scientists, those in the medical field and parents with one quantum of common sense. The story goes on:
The campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorize about $190 million in federal funding for such programs, which have come under increasing criticism because of a series of reports that concluded they are ineffective. Such criticism has prompted at least 17 states to refuse federal funding for such programs.
The group hopes to counter that trend, in part with a provocative video that asserts that comprehensive sex education encourages sexual activity by teenagers and a Web site that offers advice to parents about sex education.
The three-minute video depicts a mother of a 13-year-old girl becoming alarmed after learning details about sex ed curriculum being used in her school, including suggestions that teenagers can take showers together and give each other condoms.Proponents of comprehensive sex ed condemned the campaign as misleading, noting that the "Be Proud! Be Responsible!" curriculum cited in the video was developed to reduce the spread of the AIDS virus among African American males ages 13 to 19. Showering was cited as an example of a behavior that entailed a low risk of transmitting the virus.
Wow. Just wow.
First, do you believe for a second that, in this culture that values victimization, if parents learned their children are being told to shower together, the video wouldn't be on YouTube and legions of right wing loonies wouldn't be jumping up and down on every street corner in America, pointing at the video as proof their cause is valid. As it turns out, they had to find a video from a sex ed video IN AFRICA that talks, for the briefest of moments, about showering as a way to be intimate without spreading HIV, which kills one in every three goddamned people in that country.
But, when confronted by cold, hard, irrefutable fact that these programs do not work, you'll grab at anything you can. Even if it's a chainsaw.
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