Both Sides Now

There was a report on CBS News last night, Bush, about a topic I've raised with you before: sex education in the schools, and how your people have multiplied enormously the funds that go to programs supporting abstinence-only teaching. $900 million, I heard. At the expense, needless to say, of programs that teach young people today's realities about safe sex, for example, and the use of condoms to avoid pregnancy and disease--let alone the emotional responsibilities involved in sexual activity.

It's a little like teaching creationism as though it were some kind of equivalent or plausible alternative to evolution. Hard science, proven facts, and rational critical thought are shoved aside in favor of the way your fundamentalist supporters believe things to be--or ought to be--with nothing but faith on their side. I have to think that your God, in His Goodness, would want us to teach our youngsters truths that could save their lives. And that He would approve of our human efforts to discover and reveal the truth about His reality. Surely, if He's up there in His heaven somewhere, He would not want us to hide from the potential He has given us, to think, and reason, and make sensible judgments about the way we take action in the world.

No matter, I didn't start out to rant about sex education this morning. I actually wanted to talk about CBS and its reporting, in which that "both sides" attitude resulted once again in a distortion of the story--as though there were a perfectly sound argument on either side. There isn't. There's good, solid evidence, founded in research, that shows that "abstinence-only" simply doesn't work in the real world. And yet CBS presented lots of authoritative voices--teachers, principals--spouting on about the wonderful results of preaching the benefits of abstinence before marriage; and stacked these up against a couple of wide-eyed teenagers asking for a more complete and credible approach. No mention of inconvenient, but widely available information--such as the fact that 88% of those youngsters who are prevailed upon to take the chastity "pledge" succumb to the temptations of their sexuality way before marriage anyway; and that, when good intentions fail them, they engage in sex more dangerously for the ignorance they have been sold instead of useful and important knowledge.

Is this about ratings, Bush? Has our Dan learned his lesson from your people after the forged document debacle? That to keep his audience, he must produce the pablum that your supporters want to hear--or at least show nothing to alienate those people with anything as unsettling as the truth?

It's subtle and insidious, the way things get distorted, Bush. But pervasive. It won't be long, at this rate, before we live in a society based on ignorance, half-truths, deceptions, outright lies. I watch this happening in disbelief, anger, sadness...