Christian sex outlaws
Thanks to a little-known federal program sponsored by the Christian right,
teens are learning less about AIDS, STDs, and birth control than they were even
five years ago. And they're still having lots of sex.
by Michael Bronski
George W. hasn't even moved into the White House yet, and we've already
traveled back in time to the cultural nightmare that was Nancy Reagan's "Just
Say No" campaign. Earlier this month, the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development released the results of a study showing that teen
virginity pledges can effectively delay sexual intercourse until later in life.
Virginity pledges, for those who've been too busy screwing around to notice,
are public promises made by young people -- usually Christian youth -- to
abstain from having sex until marriage. But the devil (as usual) is in the
details; in this case, it lies in what the definition of "sex" is.
It is a biological fact that teenagers -- whether or not they engage in sex --
are hard-wired with sexual desires. A lot of sexual desires. So it's no
surprise that many of them have found ways to have sex even if they want to
remain virgins. How? In what may be a major legacy of the Clinton
administration, teens have simply redefined abstinence. A 1999 study of
Midwestern high-school students between the ages of 12 and 17 showed that they
shared no common definition of the word -- which, according to the dictionary,
pretty clearly means "to refrain from something by one's own choice."
Maybe it was the vagueness of the word "something" they had trouble with. In
1998, a survey of freshmen and sophomores at Southern colleges showed that,
according to the New York Times, "a quarter considered anal intercourse
as abstinence and more than a third surveyed did not consider oral sex to be
sex." The figure rose when no one involved had an orgasm. Numbers were similar
for masturbation with another person. If you think this is surprising, hold on
to your hat: a 1999 survey disclosed that nearly a third of health educators
believe that oral sex constitutes abstinence. It seems Bill Clinton wasn't so
far off the mark after all.
The tragedy here is manifestly self-evident: you can still contract sexually
transmitted diseases, including syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes,
through unprotected oral sex. Likewise, unprotected anal sex is highly
conducive to HIV transmission. But there's also a delicious irony: by insisting
on abstinence, the "just say no" culture of Christian conservatism is producing
a generation of youth who've embraced sexual acts that not only are
traditionally considered "deviant" -- but are illegal in 18 states. This is no
mean feat for a political movement that is doing its damnedest to inculcate, if
not mandate, a standard of "normal" and "responsible" sexual behavior in its
young people. Not that young adults (and older ones, too) shied away from anal
and oral sex before the rage for virginity pledges took hold. But there's a
startling connection between the right wing's tenacious definition of "real
sex" as heterosexual and reproductive (and permissible only within the confines
of marriage) and the new, widespread belief that anal and oral sex fall
squarely outside the definition of "sex." Indeed, it seems that these young
people are ignoring St. Paul's injunction that "it is better to marry than to
burn" and following Edna St. Vincent Millay's dictum about burning their
candles at both ends -- literally.
Nancy Reagan's simplistic -- and ultimately useless -- solution to the
country's drug problem became a joke minutes after the phrase "Just say no"
passed her lips. But her delusional misunderstanding of human nature, coupled
with her profound denial of the realities of drug use, sparked a revolution, of
sorts, that has endured. The infamous slogan, and its peculiarly shallow
assumptions, live on in the massive anti-sex campaign of recent years. And
thanks to the virginity-pledge study, we now know the results. Although its
findings were ambiguous at best and disingenuous at worst, the study received
bright, bold, and not-very-critical attention in the press -- although
Salon's Jennifer Foote Sweeney turned out a wickedly funny critique.
Remarkably, most of the press has paid no attention to the virginity-pledge
movement's distinctly conservative religious roots. Founded in 1993, the
abstinence program that promotes virginity pledges, True Love Waits, is a
mission organized by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board. By 1995, more
than 2.5 million adolescents had taken the pledge, and pledge organizers
estimate that more than three times as many have done so since. Other
conservative groups, too, have promoted virginity pledges in schools and youth
organizations. To attract new pledgers, they often hold rallies, complete with
public witnessing, led by celebrities -- usually Christian artists such as
Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, and Petra, as well as conservative
politicians (Alan Keyes) and media personalities (Lakita Garth, Miss Black
America 1995). Organizers simply require pledgers to state publicly (often in
writing) that they will refrain from all sex until marriage. Just say no, and
no, and no, and no, and no, and no, and no ...
But a close reading of the National Institute report, which was based on
responses from 6800 students in 141 schools, betrays deep and troubling flaws
in the study. True, it showed that the average pledger refrained from sex for
18 months longer than the average nonpledger. But the report not only failed to
consider the possibility that the young respondents might not have been
entirely truthful (gee, think teens lie about sex?); it also portrayed an
astonishingly limited "success." Pledge movements were found to work best with
15- and 16-year-olds and were not very effective with older teens; they worked
best when there was limited peer support (through forming a clique); and they
fell apart when more than 30 percent of a school's students pledged. The most
alarming finding was that when pledgers did break their troths, they were far
less likely to use birth control than teens who had not pledged. Apparently,
the harder they pledge the harder they fall.
And this is only the beginning of the bad news. Virginity pledges are simply
the tip of a far more dangerous trend: the proliferation of high-school
sex-education programs that teach sexual abstinence as the only sure way to
avoid pregnancy, STDs, and AIDS. The New York-based Alan Guttmacher Institute,
which advocates for reproductive rights, has noted that 23 percent of
high-school sexuality educators now focus their curricula narrowly on promoting
abstinence, up from two percent in 1988.
How could this happen? Well, in 1996 Congress passed a little-noticed amendment
to the Welfare Reform Act -- introduced by conservative Republicans and
vigorously supported by the religious right -- that offered states
$250 million over a five-year period to support programs that would
promote abstinence as the only way to avoid pregnancy, STDs, and AIDS. The
bill's conservative grounding is made explicit in its bold language: it states
that sex outside of marriage is "likely to have harmful psychological and
physical effects." To qualify, states have to match $3 in cash and services for
every $4 received in federal funds. The bill does not bar state recipients of
federal funding from teaching birth control and disease prevention in other
health-education programs, but opponents fear that many states are using their
limited sex-education funding to match funds for federally sponsored
abstinence-only programs. (To see what Massachusetts has done with its federal
money see "Just Say No," News and Features, June 29, 2000.)
The Welfare Reform Act amendment was a startling departure from a 1981 federal
program that provided funding for secondary-school "abstinence plus" programs
that discouraged sexual activity but gave teens information on birth control,
disease prevention, and safe sex. The truly shocking news, however, is that the
1996 amendment's budget is more than three times the allocation for HIV and
AIDS education -- which amounts to only $30 million a year.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, like curricula that promote the
teaching of creationism, abstinence-only programs amount to educational
malpractice. But the abstinence-only programs are actually much worse: they put
students at risk for disease by denying them access to basic health
information. And since every state now accepts federal funds provided by the
1996 Welfare Act amendment, abstinence-only programs are national in scale.
Each state may design its own program, but all share one common thread: they
teach teens about sexuality by declaring that chastity until marriage is the
only way. Some states use the money for billboards, pamphlets, public speakers,
or bumper stickers, but many do use it for classroom instruction -- where
teachers are forbidden to discuss issues of biology, sexuality, STDs,
contraception, AIDS and HIV prevention, and safe sex. To quote Little Richard,
that great promoter of sex in 1950s teen culture: good golly, Miss Molly.
Not everyone is happy with this arrangement. A committee on HIV prevention at
the National Academy of Sciences has called abstinence-only programs "poor
fiscal and public-health policy" (people under 25 account for 50 percent of all
new HIV cases in the US). Until the recent virginity-pledge study, three major
studies of abstinence programs showed almost no convincing evidence that they
delayed the onset of sexual activity among teens. According to a 1990 study by
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 54 percent of all high-school
students are sexually active by the time they reach 17, and in eight national
polls taken over the past decade, 80 percent of parents of high-school students
say they want their children to be taught how to take precautions against
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence programs, of course,
deprive students of this necessary heath advice.
Abstinence-only programs -- along with the absurd virginity pledges, which work
only so long as pledgers are in a small, sex-free clique -- completely
underestimate young people's capacity for making informed decisions and
becoming responsible adults. They also misunderstand the sexual and emotional
drives that make human beings, well, human. Christian doctrine has long held
that the body is God's temple and must be respected as such. By funneling
hundreds of millions of dollars into "health" programs that do almost no good,
refuse to address the basic physical, emotional, and psychological welfare of
young people, and deny teens vital information they need to maintain their
bodies in a healthy manner, abstinence-only zealots are causing irreparable
harm to those they claim they want to save.
Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash,
and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin's). He can be reached at
mabronski@aol.com.