Sex-Ed Hearing: Not So Sexy

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It’s hard to believe a hearing on sex could be so dull. This morning, the vaunted Henry Waxman convened a marathon hearing before his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to “assess” the evidence on abstinence-only sex education, on which the federal government has spent more than $1.3 billion in recent years. The program requires states that take the money to refrain from teaching about contraception in school unless it’s to talk about scary STDs and condom failure rates, while encouraging young people to avoid sex until marriage, an expectation that 95 percent of Americans fail to meet.

As oversight hearings go, this one turned out to be a snoozer, in large part because there’s not much news here. About a bazillion studies have all found that not only does abstinence-only education not work to reduce unwed pregnancy or STDs, but that it perpetuates false information about the reliability of the things that do work, disparages gays and lesbians, promotes religion in public schools, and demeans women.

The federal program has produced one major success: giving life to a bunch of loony fringe religious groups that wouldn’t exist but for those federal funds. Many of these groups got their start as “crisis pregnancy centers” that used dubious tactics to dissuade young women from having abortions. But their views were largely left off the panel, a fact that irked Republicans who accused Waxman of stacking the hearing solely with critics. Indiana Rep. Mark Souder complained that Waxman had failed to invite such witnesses as the doctors who treat girls infected with STDs “while using condoms.” He fumed about liberals who are promoting a “radical sexual economy” as part of their attack on abstinence programs, and suggested that teaching kids about birth control and condoms was part of that depraved agenda.

Despite a heavy line of up of public health officials on the schedule, Waxman kicked off the “oversight” hearing with testimony from two of his own colleagues, Rep. Lois Capps, a former school nurse from California who once taught sex ed, and Sen. Sam Brownback, whose only credentials on the issue seemed to be his parenting of five children. (Waxman even swore them in.) Nonetheless, a surprising number of members showed up to pelt questions at the pair, including our own DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who wasted most of her time talking about how nice it was to work with Brownback on some previous marriage issues. (True to form, though, she also razzed Brownback for failing to vote for D.C. statehood.) Souter managed to make Brownback look like a moderate after asking if it would be appropriate to ask 9-year-olds whether such things as masturbation, oral sex and naked cuddling qualified as abstinence, which he claimed was common in traditional sex ed classes. Of course, Capps and Brownback said no.

Despite attempts by Democrats to get Brownback to concede that federal dollars might be better spent, it was clear that Brownback and the other Republicans in the room weren’t going to be swayed by anything resembling science, or even their traditional opposition to federal spending. They stayed on message, which seemed to be that abstinence-only funding ought to continue because regular sex ed doesn’t work either. “The parents of this country want their children to be abstinent,” Brownback insisted.

I confess to hearing the call of the “asparagus festival” going on in the Rayburn building cafeteria and leaving before the meatier part of the hearing began, as it took more than an hour and a half just to finish up with Brownback. The administration witness wasn’t slated to go on until the very end, which was hours away. But it was clear from the get-go that the hearing would change few minds and produce few new pieces of information. (A webcast of the hearing is available here.) Democrats don’t seem ready or able to put an end to the boondoggle on this one, despite the consensus that it is, in fact, an ideologically driven waste of money. Instead, they have introduced legislation in both the House and Senate to provide federal funding for comprehensive sex-ed that would actually give kids something besides a virginity pledge to help them avoid early pregnancy and pernicious diseases.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate