Sunday, June 01, 2008

I wish them luck

From The Washington Post:

Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.

The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.

The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.

"There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children," said Valerie Huber, the group's executive director.

People who promote abstinence education are not foolish enough to believe that it will work in every case. They know that about 20% of teens are going to have sex no matter what you tell them and around 20% are not going to have sex no matter what kind of peer pressure they are subjected to. The goal of abstinence education is influence the 60% in between who are open to being led.



Here is the NAEA video mentioned in the Post article.

I have friends who are public school teachers who tell me that this kind of thing is not uncommon in modern public schools.