Blue Skirt: Enough, already!
Posted by Alice Lieberman on Apr 8th, 2008
I don’t know about you, but I am getting nomination fatigue. In my last blog, I said would vote for Ralph Nader because I so did not like the Clinton tactics. OK, I was mad. And I recognize that John McCain would be unmitigated disaster. So I take it back because, while I find many of her tactics underhanded, she is nothing compared to the other side, who are wholly responsible for making “Swift-boat” a verb.
In order to mitigate this fatigue, however, I thought I would write about ... sex, specifically, the latest data that show that one in four young women have a sexually transmitted disease. Furthermore, as the New York Times notes, “nearly half the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study — human papillomavirus (HPV, which can lead to cancer), chlamydia, genitalherpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.”
The study did not look at causal factors: the women were not asked about their behavior, and the articles about this make no mention of a prospective study—one in which very young women are followed over time, with multiple data collection points and queries about behavior and knowledge. But the results should be a cause of concern to boomers everywhere, whose daughters and granddaughters may fall into this age cohort. An obvious place to look for some answers is in the realm of sex education, or what passes for sex education these days. Smart people at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation are paid a lot of money to refute the possibility that “abstinence-only” sex education is not the culprit. But Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. is agnostic on the subject, and even they were surprised by the results of their own study, which amply demonstrates the futility of abstinence-only sex education (more information about this study may be found here).
Of course, evidence has never deterred conservatives from their social-engineering shenanigans. Aided and abetted by the Bush administration, they have managed to promote oppression, disease, and death by influencing the imposition of the “global gag rule,” which bars U.S. family planning assistance to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who, with their own, non-U.S. funds, engage in abortion-related activities in their country. NGOs refusing to abide by these restrictions lose vital U.S. family planning funds and technical assistance. They also lose access to contraceptives, including condoms, donated by the United States, which hastens the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. In the developing world, this is a death sentence that we consign women to.
The insistence by conservatives that we lie by omission to our children, as well as women in the developing world, about sex and disease prevention, is mind-boggling. We know what we need to do to save our own daughters and the daughters of others worldwide. And for this reason, a new administration and a new Congress cannot get here soon enough.
Like I said, enough already.
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