The chickens come home
Abstinence, anyone? Strange things do happen. Earlier this month Senator Jesse Helms (RN.C.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, relented after years of obstructionism and allowed the...
...Federal funding guidelines, stemming from the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, prohibit such programs from providing students with information about contraception...
...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...
...High school students, let alone younger children, should not be engaging in sexual intercourse...
...Taking a pledge delays intercourse for a long time," the study concludes...
...None of the above...
...The Left is eager to paint abstinence programs as a scheme by the Religious Right to restore traditional gender roles and sexual morality...
...Some critics even contend that abstinence-only sex education represents an unconstitutional entanglement of church and state...
...In other contexts, such a willful rejection of new knowledge is called obscurantism...
...It's too bad she didn't break this circle of destructiveness by urging that her act of personal generosity toward the oppressed be reflected in public policy...
...To be sure, Democrats retaliated in kind during the nomination of Clarence Thomas...
...On the other hand, they uniformly defended the conduct of the congressional staffers and others sent to Florida to stop the recount...
...An earlier version of the paper presented at a Planned Parenthood of New York City workshop brought an extraordinary reaction, with the president of SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) leading an "Abstinence programs do not work" chant...
...Many churches in the eighties and nineties offered sanctuary to Central Americans fleeing the violence of war and revolution...
...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...
...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...
...If Helms can come to terms with the obvious good the UN represents, perhaps "progressive" educators and other advocates of what is called "comprehensive sex education" will one day come to see the virtue and effectiveness of stressing abstinence in public-school sex education...
...The politics of resentment created something almost akin to what Adorno called the authoritarian personality...
...The debate over the place of moral norms in sex education has long been contentious...
...Virginity pledges and other "abstinenceonly" programs are particularly controversial when implemented in public schools...
...This mindset seemed to legitimize in29 (Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...
...The new study, conducted by Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Christine Bachrach of Yale, concluded that teenagers who took a pledge to abstain from intercourse until marriage "are much less likely" to have intercourse than adolescents who did not pledge...
...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...
...For religious conservatives, schools that provide information about contraception are seen to be enabling immoral behavior...
...Wrong action for right reason...
...Thus Chavez's remarks on her withdrawal were both ironic and sobering...
...The columns of several highly respected Republican pundits read like James Baker's press statements...
...don swift Erie, Pa...
...6 (Continued from page 4) passions to win political support...
...We pondered: Right action for wrong reason...
...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...
...chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, relented after years of obstructionism and allowed the United States to pay its back dues to the United Nations...
...Still, the BearmanBachrach study has not been greeted with enthusiasm by all...
...The pledge, an idea originating with the Southern Baptist church, has been taken by nearly 3 million American adolescents...
...Virginity Pledges by Teenagers Can Be Highly Effective, Federal Study Finds," read the surprising (for some) headline in the New York Times (January 4...
...has had devastating consequences, especially for young and poor women and their children...
...The delay effect is substantial and almost impossible to erase...
...However social policy may balance the abstinence message with the provision of contraceptive information, surely abstinence is what most parents and increasingly many professionals think needs to be stressed...
...Most alarming, their treatment of Jesse Jackson's orderly protests seemed to suggest that any time an African American speaks forcefully about civil rights concerns to other blacks a riot has taken place...
...The news that abstinence works—even so-called "abstinenceonly" programs—should be welcome...
...The high rates of sexually transmitted disease, Hrv, abortion, and unwed motherhood among teenagers in the U.S...
...However, as we recall, the Reagan and Bush I administrations did not regard the sanctuary movement as altruistic, but pursued and prosecuted people who supported sanctuary...
...Of course, virginity pledges are not the sole answer to teenage irresponsibly in 5 The Chickens come home m Columnist, polemicist, and anti-union ideologue, Linda Chavez withdrew her nomination for secretary of labor in Bush II on January 10 when it became public that in the early nineties, she had taken in an abused Guatemalan woman, an illegal immigrant, and housed her for two years—an altruistic act, apparently one of many...
...There was something frightening about the bullyboy tactics of the imported demonstrators and the consistent liberties that Baker and his surrogates took with the truth...
...Nor were they always decent to their political opponents, recall Lee Atwater, Bush I campaign strategist...
...That day has not yet arrived, however...
...Certainly other Republicans have done as much as Chavez to help others, and Democrats have too...
...Playing, as she has, the role of both protagonist and victim, she deplored "the politics of personal destruction," and went on to lament the ordeal of the nominating process: "So long as the game in Washington is a game of search and destroy, I think we will have very few people who are willing to do what I did, which was to put myself through this in order to serve...
...In addition, comprehensive sex education, with its "nonjudgmental" approach to sexual activity outside of marriage, is rejected as a form of indoctrination in pernicious liberal values...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 2
