Agust Flygenring - semsagt.net

The Plot Against Sex in America

In tune with the "moral values" crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government audits of its finances in eight months.)

[...]

[A] new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of "Desperate Housewives," "Too Darn Hot" has become the national anthem. A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.

- The Plot Against Sex in America, Frank Rich, New York Times, 12/12/04
Agust skrifaði 09.12.04 18:04

Flokkun: Ameríka , Jafnréttismál , Mannlíf á jörðu , Meðmæli , Stjórnmál