Bush Wacked?

The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly reports on the misnomers, mistakes and misleading information being taught to America's youth in some sex education programs.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman's investigators:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."

• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

But these 'interpretations' of science have become quite the popular trend in the United States and Waxman has offered an amendment to H.R. 2432, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 2004, to create an independent commission to investigate the politicization of science under the Bush Administration.

Some extremists refer to the movement as that of the Christian Taliban, while others take a more methodical view. Whole blogs are devoted to the subject and whole books are being written on the subject.
With places as wholesome and family oriented as theme parks are offering non-evolutionary theories to their patrons, it seems there is nowhere to escape the debate about the separation of church and state.