Just Say No?

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If only politicians would practice what they preach:
The House Appropriations Committee subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education shocked many progressives in early June when it approved a $32 million increase for the discredited Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) program.
....
This apparent change of heart from the Democrats on abstinence-only education is an attempt to build a veto-proof majority for Labor-H. According to the June 7 Congressional Quarterly Today, President Bush has vowed to veto any Labor-H (Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education) bill that exceeds the amount that he set aside in his budget. Bush put forward a $698 billion budget. The Labor-H markup exceeds that figure by more than $10 billion. So Democrats must attract enough votes to pass the bill with a veto-proof majority if they are to prevail.
The Dems want to pass the bill because, as the second largest discretionary spending bill (behind defense), it contains money for things like Medicare, the National Institutes of Health and Center for Disease Control, job training programs, unemployment benefits, Head Start, Global HIV/AIDS funding, k-12 school counselors, Pell Grants, Public Broadcasting, and Social Security. (You can download a .pdf of the subcommittee's proposed spending markups here.)

There are two problems with this approach (assuming it works). First, absintence "education" requires that kids be taught
the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity--whether or not such gains actually exist. So abstinence programs "teach" stuff like, absintence until marriage makes marriages last longer (not true) and improves self-esteem (not true). Stuff like birth control's only addressed in terms of failure rates, and presented only as it supports the abstinence message being presented. Moreover, studies have found that abstinence education

What's worse, though, is that the people who have the most to gain from that extra $32 million are . . . the political/religious right, who are just going to funnel that money right back into the pockets of politicians who, if the intended compromise here succeeds, care more about lying to kids about sex than they do about things like properly funding proven education, health, and human services programs.

And round and round it goes.

Of course, the truth is that just like teenagers, telling politicians to just say no won't work, because that's not how the world works. People are going to have sex, and politicians are going to make unsavory compromises. Still, you can't help but wish that the shitheads of the world would fuck over someone other than kids.

Bitch_PhD really could have gone her whole life without doing that Google Image search, thereby learning that chastity belts are a kind of modern fetish gear.

Cross-posted, more or less, over at Bitch PhD.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/all/21628/Just-Say-No/