ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Some of you might recall that a little over a year ago I had to take some English classes to pick up some course credits that the Kansas Board of Accountancy requires and which I’d tested out of originally.  But since the board is comprised of people with even less of a sense of humor than the MPAA, it turns out you actually have to take these classes.  So after getting my bachelor’s degree and taking extensive higher-level writing courses, I had to go back and take English 101 and 102.  These classes were barely above the level of learning to write paragraphs, but they turned out to be surprisingly more interesting than I expected, mostly because like every online course I’ve ever taken, there are always a couple of really obnoxious people who manage to work Our Lord And Saviour Jesus Christ into every discussion.  Because to them, OLASJC really is more relevant than pretty much anything the class is actually trying to talk about.  That’s great for them, but the rest of the class generally finds it pretty annoying.

Anyway, because I’m not always as good a person as I try to be, I discovered early on that it is incredibly entertaining to torment people like that just by being myself.  There are exceptions, but typically the people who consider themselves really hardcore lovers of OLASJC really hate it when anyone challenges their assumptions or plays devil’s advocate.  Especially when that person is extremely polite and respectful about their beliefs while disagreeing with all of them.

In those classes, since they were so basic, we were required to write drafts of all our papers and post them for the class to critique.  Since we were all reading each other’s work, I loved tormenting these people by purposely choosing topics I knew they would hate, such as “why separation of church and state is especially imperative in today’s society” and “why abstinence only sexual education is fundamentally fallible”.

Anyway, I found one of those papers when I was going through my hard drive today and cleaning some stuff out.  I thought it tied pretty well into my friend 7’s comment on yesterday’s post, which observed that Sarah Palin is a champion of abstinence only education, which clearly didn’t work for her teenager, and also that despite teaching that premarital sex is wrong, now she’s championing the whole thing as a profoundly moral act since the daughter is at least not having an abortion.

And because yes, NaBloPoMo has made me just that desperate to come up with content of any type, I am posting an academic paper that I wrote for a Composition I class.  And received an A on, by the way.  I dare someone to turn this in as their own work.  I took out all my parenthetical citations because I think they’re ugly.  But I left the bibliography.

The Dangers of Abstinence Only Sexual Education
July 17, 2007

The generally professed purpose of sexual education as part of junior high and high school curriculum is to provide students with physical and emotional support during and immediately following puberty, and to give them the information necessary to make responsible sexual decisions in life. Abstinence is a key issue in this context. Complete sexual abstinence during adolescence is commonly regarded as the surest protection against venereal disease and pregnancy, and can also increase the chances that teenagers will avoid making emotionally damaging sexual decisions rooted from the rashness of youth. Nearly all sexual education programs contend that for teenage students, abstinence is the safest and most desirable option. What they do not agree on is whether it should be presented as the only option. The majority of states accept federal funding for sexual education, but the prerequisite for this funding is that sexual education curriculum must be severely curtailed to satisfy the strictly defined parameters of the government’s abstinence-only-until-marriage requirements. The surprising thing about this government-mandated curriculum is that after over twenty years in use, it still is not proven to work. Not only does it fail to accomplish its stated goal, the abstinence-only movement denies students the information they need to make fully informed sexual decisions and promotes a religiously motivated social initiative that excludes those who don’t conform to this underlying system of beliefs.

The obvious objection to abstinence-only-until-marriage is that it simply doesn’t work. Since about 1990 the rates of sexual activity among high school age students has hovered around 50 percent, and around 80 percent of young people under 24 have engaged in sexual intercourse. If abstinence-only sexual education were effective, the logical assumption is that these rates would drop. Luckily, a number of states have come to realize the inadequacy of these programs and have rejected them or failed to renew their funding.

The most significant deficiency of abstinence-only is its unreasonable reliance on the notion that students will abstain simply because they are told to do so. Because the funding’s specifications stipulate that “programs may not in any way advocate contraceptive use or discuss contraceptive methods except to emphasize their failure rates,” the 50 percent of students who choose not to abstain may not be sufficiently informed to make sound sexual decisions. This strongly suggests that not only are abstinence-only programs inadequate, they are dangerous. Not only do these programs fail to inform, but they also frequently misinform. Students may be taught a variety of fallacies, ranging from being told that “HIV can pass through condoms because the latex used in condoms is porous” to being taught that the human papillomavirus infects the host for life, both of which are untrue. Students whose only education about contraception has been focused on its ineffectiveness or on outright campaign of misinformation may or may not choose to abstain from sex altogether; however, if they do not abstain they are statistically less likely to use protection.

Another, more insidious effect of abstinence-only-until-marriage education is that it represents a subtle insertion of religious ideological initiatives into public school curriculum. Because it relies heavily on religious proscriptions against premarital sex, the situations of students who lack the desire or ability to conform to this highly fictionalized idea are not adequately addressed. Programs that accept government funding are directed to teach “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity”, but this is unrealistic as well as misleading. With an incidence of premarital sex as high as 75 percent in Americans age 20 or younger, it can hardly be argued that abstinence-only-until-marriage represents the interests of the majority of young Americans. This is an irresponsible agenda that does not take into account that “80 million adults are classified as single because they have either delayed marriage, have decided to remain single, have divorced, are widowed, or have entered into [homosexual] partnerships, and which unreasonably teaches students that to fail to fit into the monogamous ideal—which is not practiced by most Americans—is to commit an immoral act. This is unconscionably unfair to homosexual teenagers, adolescents who have been sexually abused, or anyone who simply does not prefer marriage.  Even if the rate of people who fail to fit this mold were less than 80 percent, that group would still deserve the benefit of comprehensive sexual education that addresses a variety of worldviews and lifestyles.

The classical argument issued by proponents of abstinence-only-until-marriage is that sexual education should emphasize morality and marriage, and that comprehensive sexual education encourages teenages to engage in premarital sex, which is not desirable because of the risks it carries. While the suggestion that sex should occur only in context of marriage is seriously problematic for the reasons discussed above, the latter portion of the argument would be a valid one—if the programs worked. But the reality is that teenage sexual activity has not changed materially over the last two decades, and faith in abstinence-only is plummeting because the programs do not accomplish their stated purpose. This is one instance in which less is certainly not more.  Teenagers deserve to be taught according to the principle that whatever their personal beliefs, lifestyles, or situations, they have the right to be informed and to make sound personal decisions based on that information.

Abstinence-Only-Until Marriage Programs: History of Government Funding (n.d.). Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/rrr/history.htm.

A Brief History of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Funding (n.d.). Retrieved July 8, 2007, from http://www.nomoremoney.org/history.html.

Huffstutter, P.J. States Abstain from Federal Sex-Ed Funds (April 8, 2007). Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907T.shtml.

Maine Declines Federal Funds for Abstinence-Only Sex Education Programs, Says New Guidelines Prohibit ‘Safe-Sex’ Curriculum (n.d.). Retrieved July 8, 2007, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=30992.

The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Toward a Sexually Healthy America: Roadblocks Imposed By the Federal Government’s Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Educational Program (n.d.). Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/abstinenceonly.pdf.

Sternberg, Julie. Lies We Teach Teenagers. March 21, 2007. Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/21/lies_we_teach_teenagers.php.

Trenholm, Christopher, and Barbara Devaney. Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs. Retrieved July 8, 2007, from http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/PDFs/impactabstinence.pdf.

Anyway.  The guy in my class that I wrote this little thing for, he hated it.  And I loved it that he hated it.  Incidentally, this was the same guy who wrote his persuasive paper arguing that the constitution should be changed to more closely reflect biblical law.  The teacher wrote a polite note to him basically saying, “You might want to rethink this topic because it is the most retarded thing any of us have ever heard” only in a way nicer way.