President Obama is causing the “core culturewar battle” over sex education to “come full circle” by proposing to redirect funding for abstinenceonly sex education to a new Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative that “rejects an abstinenceonly approach,” Washington Times columnist Cheryl Wetzstein writes. According to Wetzstein, Obamas fiscal year 2010 budget plan “zeroed out” the Title V abstinenceonly sex education grant program, set to expire on June 30, and the CommunityBased Abstinence Education program.
Wetzstein continues that groups supporting comprehensive sex education have “loathed Title V from its inception” because of its “prohibition on teaching teens how to use birthcontrol products (i.e., no condom demonstrations) and its eightpoint definition that seemed utterly unrealistic to sex educators.” For example, Title Vs definition said that the “expected standard of human sexual activity” was a “mutually faithful, monogamous relationship in the context of marriage,” which Wetzstein says she has “heard many times, was insulting to gay youth who couldnt marry” and “insensitive to minority youth who grew up in neighborhoods where marriage was rare.”
Wetzstein asks, “What will happen to Title V?” She writes that opponents “are staying vigilant” and working to avoid “any lastminute, backdoor revivals of this program.” Groups that support abstinenceonly sex education are “working the phones, too,” Wetzstein reports. According to Wetzstein, Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, noted that “[s]aving Title V will require some heavy lifting, but its expired before and been retroactively renewed.” Wetzstein concludes that “well soon see what happens with the new players in town” (Wetzstein, Washington Times, 6/23).
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