Your Tax Dollars Wasted by Bush

Came across this little waste of tax money: Derek the Abstinence Clown. Yes...you read that right. Derek Dye was paid as part of the Abstinence Only program to promote abstinence. Here is a video of Derek at work:



Now, this guy is just awful. And on many blogs he gets a lot of crap for how bad he is. But I am cutting him some slack. His performance (no pun intended) isn't what I am going to rant about. I don't even know if he writes his own material. It sounds like something written by a committee. He may just be a well-meaning schlamiel trying to make a buck and probably sincerely trying to do right by kids. Probably this was the best he could do with what is pretty much lousy material.

What is a crime here is not his performance. It is the very fact that the Bush Administration wasted so much money on a program that had been proven not to work. According to all reliable research shows that it just plain doesn't work. Abstinence only is about the WORST way to try and reduce teen pregnancy, the spread of STDs, or abortion. The organization SIECUS has some of the most comprehensive information on Abstinence Only vs. Traditional, Reality-Based Sex Education. For example:

Federal Evaluation Finds Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Ineffective

In April 2007, a federally funded evaluation of Title V abstinence-only-until- marriage programs was released. The study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are ineffective. Of the more than 700 federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, the evaluation looked at only four programs. These programs were handpicked to show positive results and they still failed.1


Mathematica’s evaluation found no evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs increased rates of sexual abstinence—the entire supposed purpose of the programs.


Students in the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs had a similar age of first sex and similar numbers of sexual partners as their peers who were not in the programs.


The average age of sexual debut was the same for the abstinence-only-until-marriage participants and control groups (14 years, 9 months).

In another study it was found that pretty much 90% of Americans have pre-marital sex. Looking at younger Americans, by age 20, 77% of respondents had had sex, 75% of those had had premarital sex. The bottom line is people like to have sex. It is natural and it is part of who we are. The trick is to get people to do it responsibly and safely. And we definitely have ways of doing that. Well-funded, reality based, comprehensive sex ed combined with ready availability of contraceptives is the definitively best way to reduce the rate of teen pregnancy, spread of STDs and abortions.

So, no matter how much we pay Derek the Abstinence Clown, he is part of a program that fails across the board. It isn't Derek's fault. It is the fault of right wing ideologues who ignore facts in their pathological fear of sex and particularly of women's sexuality. We shouldn't be paying people like Derek to teach an ineffective curriculum to our kids.