Bloggasm

You ever have one of those instances in elementary or middle school that you look back and wish you knew what you know now so you could raise your hand and argue with the teacher? When I was in middle school and we were having our second installment of sex education (the first was in fifth grade), a stocky, butch PE teacher told us about how sexually transmitted diseases could not only be given through broken condoms, but that they could actually slip THROUGH THE FIBERS of unbroken condoms. Therefore, nothing but abstinence was safe. Boys just wanted sex and you don’t have to prove your love by having sex. I’m sure you’ve heard all this before.

But the great thing about propaganda being shoved down your throat while you’re young is the fact that when you get older, you can figure stuff out on your own (this is why I don’t know why conservatives are getting their panties bunched up over teachers toting their liberal beliefs in the classroom). If I could travel back in time, I could ask the teacher, “What about people who don’t ever want to get married? Which partner should they have sex with?” or any number of rebuttals. But alas, I can’t. Like everyone else in the world, I grew up to learn that sex wasn’t so bad and it didn’t destroy lives and that people have sex all the time (average age of males for losing virginity is 16, I think, and girls are 17).

Realizing all this, conservatives are now pushing their ideology towards a much more dangerous student body: Medical students.

Conservatives teach sex ed to medical students. Thanks, Congress.:

As Michael Specter pointed out in The New Yorker last month, the Bush administration spends hundreds of millions of dollars touting the benefits of abstinence. Most abstinence-promoting programs waste the government’s money funneling misinformation directly to adolescents. But one such group, the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, has another audience in mind—medical students. With the help of Congress, the institute has finagled $200,000 out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop a sexual-health curriculum for doctors in training. It’s a small bit of pork, but it represents the hijacking of a government agency that normally funds research based on merit. And the CDC’s imprimatur could persuade medical schools to use the institute’s work.

As most people know, abstinence-only programs are not only ineffective, they’re dangerous as well. Because all they do is promote ignorance and misinformation, students are unable to take necessary safety precautions and instead end up pregnant or with an STD. Now that this ignorance is being pushed towards medical students, things have gotten so much darker.

The program is headed by Dr. Joe McIlhaney, someone who Feministing has accused of rape and denying emergency contraception to women.

I want to be outraged at all this, but instead I’m just sad.