Abstaining From Education

That abstinence education works out really well if you are trying to keep our young people pregnant and sick. Seems that with its usual results, the wingnut community has produced another harmful program that our tax dollars are supposed to support.

As Avedon pointed out yesterday at The Sideshow, the wingers think your funds ought to be freed up to spend on their programs, that's the kind of freedoms they believe in.

For our youth who are victimized by the nutjob approach to their future, lots of damage is occurring. Dallas County has seen the results of disease on the increase from its abstinence-only policies, and corrected that practice. The country is learning the hard way, as well, and our youth are being used as the guinea pigs in demonstrating the wingnut ideology works against them.

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

In addition, about 16,000 pregnancies were reported among 10- to 14-year-old girls in 2004 and a similar number of young people in the age group reported having a sexually transmitted disease.

"It is disheartening that after years of improvement with respect to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we now see signs that progress is stalling and many of these trends are going in the wrong direction," said Janet Collins, a CDC director.

The results are in, the programs of the wingnuts have failed. We can't waste lives on any further indulgence of this nonsense.

Our schools are threatened by the onslaught of those who want their way, no matter how much harm it does. These rabid ideologists do not serve our kids, they serve a warped concept of religion. They should be required to learn by reading and contemplation, not experiments on our young people.