10.31.06
Imagine Rick Santorum or Bill Frist hiding under your bed when you’re having sex…
… because that day is creeping closer and closer.
I wanted it to just be some crazy Hallowe’en stunt, but it seems not. Courtesy of the Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report:
Newly revised federal guidelines have expanded the scope of the $50 million Title V abstinence education grant program to include unmarried adults up to age 29, USA Today reports (Jayson, USA Today, 10/31). …According to Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, the revised guidelines for 2007 are aimed at people ages 19 to 29 because recent data show that more unmarried women in that age group are having children. “We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents,” Horn said. The revised guidelines stipulate that states applying for the grants are “to identify groups … most likely to bear children out of wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range.” (Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, 10/27).
Yes, that’s right. Abstinence-only sex education is being encouraged not only for public-school-aged students (no, I will not say “public-school-aged children” because for a bunch of reasons, I do not think that’s an appropriate term to use when referring to adolescents — and neither does the U.S. government, apparently, since they think high school is old enough to expect students to sign up as part of the Junior ROTC and learn how to be good little soldiers for the Shrubbian jihad) but for people who are legal adults, technically entitled to the freedoms of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The official rationale is that single women under the age of 30 are having more children out of wedlock.
(Shock, horror, general alarum. General failure to notice that everywhere else in the industrialized world, women are increasingly choosing to bear at least their first child as unmarried women. This is particularly true in northern Europe. In Sweden, for example, 70% of cohabiting couples who have a child have the child first, then marry within five years of the child’s birth. I note that Sweden is still trundling along just fine, churning out those cunning little flat-pack Ikea dining room sets just like anything. And interestingly enough, Sweden is officially a Protestant country.)
The real rationale is that the Shrubbian jihad isn’t only being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, folks, it’s being fought right here at home and one of its goals is to bring your lives in line with someone else’s patriarchal repressive fundamentalist Christian version of where, how, and with whom you should be having a sex life.
If you live in one of the states that accepts Title V, Section 510b funding — and unless you live in California, Maine, New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania, you do — get off your duff and start writing some snarly letters to your congresscritters. I would, personally, suggest that when you do, you call for the firing of HHS assistant secretary Wade Horn, who may be only a figurehead but still needs a swift Doc Marten to the buttcheek for form’s sake if nothing else. Regardless of where you live, letters to your congresscritters and to Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services are definitely in order (the HHS address is: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services · 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. · Washington, D.C. 20201).
I have never been a fan of abstinence-only “sex education.” It is one of the few things for which I will never forgive Bill Clinton (the legislation that provides funding for it was first enacted during his administration, in 1996). But there is a big honking line between directing your tiresome (and ineffective, and inaccurate, and po-faced, and hypocritical, and farfetched, and…) propaganda at minors in public schools, where state governments do indeed have the right to require whatever curricula they deem appropriate are taught, and deciding that it is appropriate to go out and flail the same tiresome bullshit at legal adults.
The federal government has no business telling you what you can and cannot do with your consenting adult genitals. They want very badly to change this. This is how they’re getting their foot into your bedroom door.