Is an aspirin held firmly between your legs, gals. For the next stage of the abstinence-only era is upon us: The targeted market has been extended to all the twenty-somethings:
he federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.
Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.
The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.
"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."
Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.
The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.
But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.
Wade Horn. The man who said what makes a family is a father. He is one of the Christianists, I bet, who have invaded the federal apparatus we used to call the government but which is now called the Religious Police Against Vice.
All this was clear from the beginning, by the way. The abstinence attack and the traditional marriage attack were not intended for just the teenagers and the poor respectively, but for all of us ultimately. Wingnuts have for decades practised an incremental approach to changing our whole lives into a Talibanish nightmare, with the hope that we are like the frog stuck in a saucepan which is then slowly heated to a boiling point. Frogs presumably get used to the rising temperature and never notice that they get boiled.