Jesus must hate America, because under George Bush he allowed Christians ideologues and con artists to promote and profit from abstinence only sex education. A policy they counted on on to stop teenage sex hasn’t stopped sexual behavior by young people. All it’s done is increase the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in America:
“Chlamydia and gonorrhea are stable at unacceptably high levels and syphilis is resurgent after almost being eliminated,” said John Douglas, director of the division of sexually transmitted diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have among the highest rates of STDs of any developed country in the world,” Douglas added in a telephone interview.
The article goes on to mention that “several studies” have shown that these conservative abstinence only programs that the “Moral Majority” loves to death do not work. Why that is a shock to anyone is beyond me. Then again, maybe all those caring Christians who oppose honest discussion and teaching of how to prevent STD’s simply want to punish teenagers for all the sex they never got when they were young.
Well, let me say that it isn’t immoral to properly educate our kids. It’s immoral no to do so. Indeed, the failure to warn adolescents of how to prevent STDs shows a lack of compassion and a desire to see “sinners” punished that I contend at best shows a reckless indifference to the danger that such programs pose to others. Frankly, in my humble opinion it’s sadistic to continue to promote such hurtful and harmful policies.
In my mind its the moral equivalent of selling alcohol or drugs to minors. Nothing good will come of it other than the short term profit made be the sellers. In this case, what our children have been sold is ignorance in order to profit an ideology that would rather see a public health disaster than inform children how to prevent serious life altering diseases.
And what have the promoters received for this atrocity? One Point Nine Billion of Your Tax Dollars. Think about that for a moment. A gang of morally bankrupt ideologues legally scammed the Federal government (and many state governments as well) out of your money that went to pay for programs that made us sicker as a nation. If someone sold snake oil as a cure which made someone ill we’d expect the seller/con artist to be charged as a criminal. Well, the “abstinence only” sex education is one of the most profitable snake oil industries I know.
I consider the people who profited from this scam (either monetarily or otherwise) to be criminally reckless and negligent, at best, and to have demonstrated “depraved indifference” to the effect their actions would have on the lives of others, at worst. Depraved indifference is a legal term of art which is defined as follows:
To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant’s conduct must be ‘so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime.
Sound a little harsh to you? Well not to me it doesn’t. Remember the uproar on the Right over the vaccine that could prevent certain forms of cervical cancer in women from the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus? I do:
In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.
“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.
If that isn’t evidence of a mental state of depraved indifference, i.e., “conduct so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others” I don’t know what does qualify. “Abstinence Only” sex education was never about benefiting the children. It was all about advancing a political agenda at the expense of the health and welfare of our nation.
Of course, for 1.9 BILLION DOLLARS it’s easy to see how good upstanding Christians might lose their way. But there certainly is no reason in heaven or hell why we should allow them to continue to profit off the ignorance and misery which they seek to spread to others. You right wingers don’t want to pay for abortion services? Well I don’t want to pay for the damage to lives and the public health caused by your delusions and false sense of righteousness.
But then I am pro-life, in fact. I support health care for all. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose the slaughter and misery of innocent people abroad, and the death and physical and mental harm which our military service people have had to endure, for the wars you supported, wars based on lies which primarily benefit the bottom lines of a few large corporations. You folks on the Right support all sorts of policies which kill and maim and spread misery to people. And it is rank hypocrisy to claim the moral high ground based on any ideology or religious faith that would countenance such evil deeds as good and moral acts.
Abstinence Only was a bad idea when it was first proposed, one that (to assume, for the sake of argument, only the best of intentions by its proponents) lacked common sense and demonstrated a profound ignorance of human nature. Continuing it now in the face of all the harm it has caused, however, would truly be a sin.
