(Weekly Column)

It was mid-afternoon and I was driving into Stillwater to speak at Oklahoma State University. Hungry, I saw a gleaming red Chick-fil-A restaurant in the distance. Now, I had never eaten at this restaurant because of its alleged anti-gay policies. Needless to say, the prohibition only heightened my curiosity and against my better judgment I slinked inside for a forbidden chicken sandwich.

I simply had to try this place!

This scenario, of course, helps explain why abstinence-only education doesn’t work. Sex is much better than a chicken sandwich (if not, find a new partner) and making it taboo only invites rule breaking. The main difference is, eating a sandwich does not lead to life-long consequences such as unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

The very notion of abstinence-only education is absurd. It is founded on the bizarre idea of telling rebellious teens not to have sex until marriage and believing that they will actually listen. Any honest parent would tell you that teenagers aren’t the best at following the commands of stuffy adults. Yet, on the crucial subject of sex education, many school districts have policies that presume teens will almost always obey preachers posing as teachers.

Clearly, abstinence-only programs are ineffective and not about public health or preparing students for responsible sexual relations. Instead, they exist so ambitious politicians can funnel public money to ideologues who want to craftily inculcate students with religious propaganda.

Project SOS in Jacksonville, Florida is one example of this slippery attempt to evangelize on the public’s dime. Despite the group’s curriculum being called “unacceptable” and inaccurate by health experts, SOS has received $6.5 million in federal funding through the Department of Health and Human services since 2002 – including $454,000 in September 2010, according to The Florida Independent.

In a special report for Truth Wins Out, researcher Bruce Wilson discovered that Pam Mullarkey, the founder and director of SOS (pictured), says God inspired her program. Her church, Beaches Chapel Church, (Not the one with Bette Midler) identifies SOS as one of its “ministries” and calls Mullarkey a “missionary”.

SOS is cunning in the way it disseminates sectarian messages to captive student audiences. For example, in one video, an actor has a tattoo on his forearm with large letters, “God is my judge.”

“In functional terms, they amount to government-backed covert religious indoctrination programs,” says Bruce Wilson in his report.

The program preaches no sex until marriage, which by design excludes LGBT teenagers who can’t legally marry. Of course, this is no surprise, considering Mullarkey’s church has an “ex-gay” ministry, “Laughter from Purity,” which teaches inmates at a faith-based prison to resist homosexuality through Jesus Christ. According to the ministry’s web-site, God loves homosexuals, but the homosexual must be set free from a “bondage of lies and deception that come from being wounded and sexually broken.”

Most disturbing is SOS’s endorsement of Martin Ssempa who presides over condom burning bonfires at a university in Kampala and is a leading backer of the “kill the gays” bill that may soon come up for a vote in Uganda’s parliament.

Referring to the fact that several of Ssempa’s family members have died of AIDS, Mullarkey told the Florida Independent that homosexuals in Africa “have destroyed people’s lives.”

Sadly, this useless program has reached more than 300,000 Florida students.  SOS has at least 40 full-time and part time government-funded employees who are surreptitiously evangelizing.

At a time when Republican blowhards are obsessed with trimming government spending, why is such foolishness still being funded? According to an ACLU Florida study, “Sex Education in The Sunshine State”, Mullarkey’s SOS programs, “Employ fear and shame- based tactics” and some “Teach misinformation on HIV/AIDS.” Such ridiculous and futile programs should be the first on the chopping block if Republicans are serious about reducing wasteful spending.

But, I doubt that will happen given the Religious Right’s stranglehold on the GOP – particularly in Florida, which is quickly becoming the new Mississippi. Republicans will pretend they are funding such programs to uphold virtue, when they are really just fishing for votes.

The disastrous Faith-based Initiative has intertwined church and state, with indoctrination slowly replacing education. Religious programs like SOS are ensuring that students don’t stand a prayer when faced with key decisions affecting their health. It is time to quit the nonsense and abstain from funding programs that are wasteful, unconstitutional and a transparent attempt to illegally raid public coffers to evangelize in public schools.

It’s always nice when American Fundamentalists decide to be a little bit more equal opportunity when they inflict their poor education and disproven methods on people.  Watch out, China:

Booklets produced by Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry based in Colorado, will be distributed to all high-school and university students in Yunnan to teach them how to reject sex before marriage.

[...]

Chinese students will be able to act our roleplays in which the boys say: “It is safe, I have a condom” and girls reply: “You want to bet my future with that condom?” According to a nationwide survey in April of 80,000 Chinese university students, a lowly 14.4 per cent admitted to having sex during their time in higher education.

In other news, the teen pregnancy rate in the Yunnan province is about to go up.

[h/t Kyle]

Steve Jordahl of Focus on the Family declared yesterday:

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced this week that gay- and bisexual-identified men are 50 times more likely to have AIDS than any other group. One-half of the HIV cases diagnosed each year in the U.S. are within the gay community.

The average Christian-rightist speed-reader might conclude that half or more of the gay population in America is infected — and that AIDS is caused by being “identified” as gay or bisexual.

But Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin points out:

…The rate of new infections in the population of gay and bisexual men in 2007 was 0.69%. Or in 2007 one out of every 144 gay/bi men seroconverted.

That still is very high. And it is consistent with our calculations that about 12% of gay/bi men (or about 6% of all gay/bi people) are infected with HIV. (So play safe kids… or better yet, find someone to have and hold from this day forward.)

Focus on the Family purposely mischaracterized the nation’s same-sex-attracted population as predominantly diseased. The organization did so, because it wants Americans to condemn, fear, and punish same-sex attraction and sexual honesty. The organization does not want its audience to ponder the actual cause of most HIV infection, which happens to be the unprotected sex which Focus encourages every time it seeks to exclude condoms from the nation’s public-health, disease-prevention, and sex-education programs — and every time it seeks to prevent discussion of homosexuality among teachers, public-health authorities, and students.

Jordahl suggests that education and disease prevention are a waste of money:

Dr. David Stevens, CEO of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, said that is throwing good money after bad.

“We spend millions and millions of dollars on education and prevention programs,” he said, “but those are often ignored by the homosexual community.”

Instead, Focus wants the federal government to divert billions of taxpayer dollars into failed “abstinence-only” programs which promote the very same sexual ignorance which led to the teen pregnancy of Bristol Palin, daughter of GOP presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

New cases of sexually transmitted infections are rising among women and African-American heterosexuals, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

CNN reports:

The CDC began a national syphilis elimination program in the late 1990s, targeted at African-American heterosexuals, especially women and their babies. As a result, the condition was nearly eradicated as an ongoing health problem in the United States.

But in the last two years, the trend has reversed, said Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention.

“The success we’ve been experiencing for a number of years in African-American heterosexual populations, particularly women, is beginning to be eroded,” he said.

Syphilis resurfaced as a danger in 2001, and cases went up by 15.2 percent between 2006 and 2007, the CDC said.

Reported cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea together surpassed 1.4 million in 2007, the report said. Both of these conditions can cause infertility when left untreated. The CDC will address HIV rates in the United States in a later report.

The rise happens to coincide with the growth of federally funded, abstinence-only programs which claim to promote abstinence by denying teen-agers access to information about disease and pregnancy prevention. Instead, these programs result in unsafe sex and an increased risk of pregnancy and abortion.

Whatever the role of abstinence-only “education,” experts say shame surrounding sexual behavior appears to be contributing to an atmosphere of silence and ignorance among youths-at-risk, parents, and doctors.

According to Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention:

If the parents assume that’s the doctor’s business, or the teacher’s business, and don’t roll up their sleeves and get in there themselves, and if our schools aren’t giving comprehensive education, and if our clergy and other community leaders who are interested in youth well-being aren’t including sexual health on the agenda, we’re going to create missed opportunities.

For more than three decades, the so-called pro-life movement — of which I was once a participant — has claimed to uphold sexual morality and the sanctity of human life, even as it promoted policies which encourage unsafe sex, untimely pregnancy, and abortion among women who are presented with no alternatives.

A new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that “pro-life” abstinence-only programs — marketed by the religious right, funded by the Bush administration, and imposed upon public schools in conservative school districts across the United States — may achieve the opposite of their intended objectives.

According to The Washington Post, the study focused on “virginity pledges,” a core element of abstinence-only education:

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”

The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. The new analysis, however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who had similar values about sex and other issues before they took a virginity pledge.

Focus on the Family continues to promote unsafe and disease-prone sex — and resulting unwed pregnancy — even as it condemns comprehensive sex-education programs which teach youths how to prevent disease and avoid pregnancies that — as such a young age — often end in abortion.

In a Dec. 16 article, Focus on the Family blames comprehensive sex education for disturbing stats on pregnancy and abortion at a school in urban Alexandria, Virginia — but fails to tell readers that the outcomes of abstinence-only programs are generally just as bad or worse. Focus also falsely insinuates that comprehensive sex ed does not educate teen-agers about abstinence. (Read More)

If the empty mantra, “Just Say No,” failed to keep teenagers off of drugs, it certainly is not going to work for sex. Yet, our government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “abstinence only” programs that promote ignorance over education, while offering a warped view of sexuality. Like all programs steeped in religious extremism, these are fear-based, anti-science and prone to great exaggerations.

Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a report in 2004 that found 11 out of 13 curriculums that preached “abstinence only” were rampant with scientific errors. In another study, researchers found that those who took so-called “virginity pledges” refrained from sex merely eighteen months longer than those who had not made such a pledge. However, the pledge-takers were six times more likely to engage in oral sex. ” The Values Virgins” were also much less likely to engage in protected sex when they finally broke their pledge or to be tested for an STD. Disease rates between the two groups were similar.

Unfortunately, the New York Times Magazine reports that “condemn the condom” clubs are taking root at premier universities. As usual, they rely on breathless, overblown tales of breaking condoms, saying, “safe sex is not safe.” Well, actually, condoms are pretty effective for those of us who had comprehensive sex education and know how to use them. I’ve yet to find one Bible-waving fanatic who can show me an HIV epidemic that broke out among people consistently wearing condoms. (Read More)