Liberal Lawmaker Suspected of Pushing 'Safe-Sex' Ed Agenda
by Mary Rettig, Bill Fancher, and Jenni Parker
December 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - Leading voices from the abstinence community across the U.S are charging that a report on federally-funded abstinence education programs by California Congressman Henry Waxman is full of false claims and omissions that misrepresent the facts about abstinence.
Last week the Democratic representative released a report on sex education titled "The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs." The report has been proffered as an objective analysis of abstinence programs. However, some proponents of abstinence education are condemning it as fraudulent propaganda, commissioned by the congressman to promote a liberal agenda of condom and contraceptive-based sex education of which Planned Parenthood would certainly approve.
In recent statements based on the report, Waxman claims that abstinence education programs in the U.S. are full of mistakes and blur the lines between science and religion. Instead of such programs, he advocated condom-based "comprehensive" sex ed, touting it as far more effective than abstinence-based programs in preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
Answering Misinformation on Abstinence Education
But Leslie Unruh of the Abstinence Clearinghouse contends that Waxman's facts are inaccurate and his motivations suspect. For instance, she notes that he "makes the comment that the [abstinence-based] programs are medically inaccurate."
That is false, Unruh says, pointing out that the programs recommended by the Abstinence Clearinghouse get their information from widely respected sources such as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "And we also know that these programs are very concerned about making sure that all those medical references in their curriculum are up to date," she adds.
The Abstinence Clearinghouse is a national, non-profit educational organization that promotes the understanding and practice of sexual abstinence through the distribution of age-appropriate, medically accurate information and resources.
With offices in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and in Washington, DC, the Abstinence Clearinghouse serves as a national association for the abstinence community and provides a central access point where abstinence, character, and relationship-based programs, curricula, speakers, and resources can be made available. The organization takes very seriously its role as disseminators of data and reliable, scientifically sound resources.
According to the Clearinghouse, there are currently 10 evaluations -- four published in peer-reviewed journals -- that show the effectiveness of abstinence education in reducing teen sexual activity. Also, the group cites an April 2003 study published in Adolescent and Family Health that found increased abstinence was the major cause of declining birth and pregnancy rates among teen girls in the U.S., accounting for 67 percent of the decline. And CDC statistics also indicate the effectiveness of the abstinence message on teens, and credit that message with a significant decrease in the number of teens who are sexually active from 54.1 percent in 1991 to 46.7 percent in 2003.
Waxman Pushing His Own Agenda?
Nevertheless, Congressman Waxman claims 11 out of 13 of the abstinence programs he studied contain errors and misleading statements. But Dr. Sharon Quick of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations feels the legislator's charges are unsubstantiated. She notes that misquotations are often found, even in scientific publications, and since Waxman did not supply any kind of an error rate with his criticism, it makes it difficult to respond to his allegations.
"In other words," Quick explains, "out of these 13 curricula, he found two that they couldn't find errors in. Of the other 11, we don't know how many footnotes or how many pages were reviewed to find these particular errors." Meanwhile, the CMDA spokeswoman says she wonders why Waxman failed to review any of the comprehensive sex-ed programs to check error rates in those.
Although Waxman appears to endorse sex ed programs that promote the "safe sex" myth, Quick says there is no such thing as safe sex, except through abstinence until marriage and fidelity in a mutually monogamous marriage relationship. Apart from these measures, she says, "You cannot do anything to completely eliminate your risk of sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. There's no contraceptive that will completely eliminate that risk."
Another of Waxman's false claims, according to the head of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, is that abstinence education is religious. And again, Unruh contends, his assertion is patently misleading since the congressman should know that abstinence teachers in federally funded programs are required to sign a form saying they will not proselytize or else they cannot receive federal funding.
But Unruh maintains that the false findings in the congressman's report should come as no surprise to the national abstinence community since one only needs to look at Waxman's past pet projects to discover his agenda. "Keep in mind," she says, "that Henry Waxman is the person that has been behind the federal funding of the flirting classes that were going on ... and other HIV so-called prevention programs, which were highly controversial. He's also the one, we should not forget, who was in support of drug legalization -- marijuana -- and federal funding for needle distribution."
Unruh says she invites Waxman and his staff to attend the International Abstinence Leadership Conference scheduled to take place next summer (August 4-6, 2005) so he can learn the real facts about abstinence education (See http://abstinence.net/library/index.php?entryid=1573). She notes that the conference is actually being held in the lawmaker's own Hollywood, California, district.
Waxman's Made-to-Order Report Not Quite Seamless
But lest anyone suppose for one moment that Congressman Waxman is simply a victim of the misinformation contained in his own report, columnist Jane Jimenez wants to set the record straight. In a recent column she revealed that Waxman ordered the report, that his own paid staff prepared it, and that he already knew what he wanted the report to say before he ordered it.
After carefully studying the 26-page Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs, many facts became clear to Jimenez that she says have oddly enough gone unreported by the mainstream media. She says the document Waxman ordered his staff to compile contains "a mass of errors and distortions" and was obviously "constructed by people who knew what they wanted to find before they looked."
The columnist calls particular attention to the fact that the document raises objections to the discussion of male/female differences and marriage in abstinence education programs. She notes that the report also seems to disfavor these programs' tendency to link healthy sex with healthy male/female relationships within marriage.
Jimenez suggests that these objections may be a key to understanding the left's resistance to abstinence education. She posits the idea that the emphases on healthy gender relationships may be seen as an affront to those who would prefer to see children in schools being taught to embrace homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
