Wednesday, October 29, 2008

That's Not a Contradiction; That's a Failed Method

Just whittling my time away while waking up to coffee this morning, I read this meaningless, fluffy little article on the "reddest" and "bluest" cities in the U.S. Among the "reddest" cities, they included Lubbock, Texas (No surprise here; 3 of the 4 they listed were in Texas, and the fourth was Provo, Utah). One of the ways they described Lubbock was "contradictory," and one of their two examples of Lubbock's "inherent" contradictions? "The city has a high rate of teenage pregnancy but an abstinence-only sex education policy."

There's nothing contradictory about this, and these aren't mutually exclusive things. Time and again, people have shown that abstinence-only sex-ed doesn't stop teenagers from having sex. While I have no expectations for an article of this type, it's still really frustrating to me that this article can espouse abstinence-only as a valid form of sex-ed even while its own evidence (Lubbock) shows that the approach doesn't work. It's one thing for right-wing nutjobs who believe people and dinosaurs lived side-by-side and that the rapture is dependent upon Israel's independence to espouse this crap, but for an "article" of this sort to also blindly accept and puke up abstinence only as a valid program and remain befuddled as to why teenagers get pregnant so often in a city with such a program is just mind-numbing and counfounding.