"A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.Sure glad that faith based sex ed has kids thinking about DRINKING BLEACH!
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant.
State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.
They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.
It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention."
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Oh, and I am guessing that some of these people are also included in this group of Missouri Baptists who think that the Confederate flag is godly.
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Oh, the Bush admin seems to never find the bottom. Now this report from NPR says that our Justice department fired a very qualified attorney because she was gay. Her performance evals were always at the top, but this justice department fired her anyway. Of course, competence could easily be a problem for people who thought Gonzo was qualified to be AG.
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And this guy has a radio show:
"[Y]ou have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists and women. They think they're owed this — just like Obama supporters think they're owed this. These women have paid their dues. They've been married two or three times; they've had two or three abortions; they've done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this — the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — is the culmination of all of these women's efforts. And if it gets stolen from them [by] a rookie, radical black guy who can't tell the time of day, they are going to be so miffed," - Rush Limbaugh.Monumentally stupid keeps coming to mind this week.
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But all is not lost. Fafnir explains "why we fight:"
Nothing less will stop the monster in the closet from allying with the boogeyman under the bed to form a sinister new Axis of Spooky
To gently massage foreign dictatorships into stable liberal democracies through the subtle and delicate eastern art of acubombing
All the older presidents an senators were all hangin out in the boys room an lookin cool an smokin cigarettes an passin around faulty pre-war intelligence an we just hadda invade
In solemn memory of that hypothetically terrible day when Saddam Hussein sent pretend terrorists to attack fictional buildings with weapons of mass imagination
We dared them, and then they double-dared us, and then we triple-dog-dared them, and if we say uncle now all the mullahs'll know we're chicken!
You wanna be president, you gotta pop at least one third-world country before you're parta the gang
If we stopped randomly blowing people up now, someone might think something's wrong with us.
14 comments:
I have no doubt that abstinence-only education is among the worst forms of miseducation, but I would want to see the Florida survey in question and an account of how it was administered to students before I put too much stock in the scope of the results. When I was in high school, one of our games was answering surveys in the most appalling manners possible, because we were bored and thought mandatory surveys were a waste of our time. My brother does the same thing, as did many of my friends from college.
If those ideas are popular enough that they made it onto a survey in the first place, then there is obviously a problem--I just don't know how widespread it actually is.
I agree with Leighton. I don't favor teaching abstinence only, but there are plenty of surveys that show kids can't find the US on a map or tell us when the Civil War was, despite having be taught geography and history. How do the results compare with students that had a more broad sex ed.?
I remember answering surveys in high school. If they were scantron sheets and the choices were letters, I would usually pick: A...C...D...C (AC/DC, I was a big headbanger in school).
I think the key word in the program is "only". It is scientifically accurate to say that the only 100% method of birth control and STD prevention is abstinence. It quickly becomes ridiculous when it's taught as the ONLY form of birth control or STD prevention, which is just inaccurate and dangerous.
One of the most common causes of death in the US is car accidents. Why don't we have non-driving only classes rather than driver's safety courses? Do you mean to tell me they'd teach my kid that since we know they're going to drive anyway they might as well teach them how to do it in a responsible way??? What an outrage. Not only that, NOT having a car means there isn't a backseat which leads us back to issue #1.
Later- BB
Leighton's point is well taken, and the "head banging principle" is clearly a problem. And this is also Florida.
But we have other evidence that sex ed that only talks about abstinence is a horrible failure. I believe one recent study showed that students on abstinence only were only 10% better than those with no sex ed at all.
It's also possible that the survey was well-written, delivered properly and in ways that could cancel out the effect of student lack of interest, and that the results are statistically meaningful. My real complaint, which I should have made clear in my first comment, is that my real problem is the news article's vagueness on exactly what this survey was. While there are surveys that are done well whose results are reliable, there are a great many that aren't. News stories can give some idea of the scope and reliability of surveys, but for some reason they usually don't.
The Local 6 article everyone has linked to about the Florida survey doesn't offer any hints about the surveying methodology. Hell, it doesn't even mention who did the survey. This is a journalistic failure; I have no choice but to be agnostic about whether the survey itself is similarly flawed.
The fact that it doesn't do what it is purported to do is enough reason to stop funding it. I wish we would do this to more programs and make a better effort to fund what really does work.
Leighton, your objection is a great one. I read that article way too fast with a pre-existing bias.
But I should also say, yeah, abstinence-only ed is unambiguously bad. That's not to say solid sex ed will reach every kid, but it reaches enough. One girl in my middle school turned white and nearly fainted when our sex ed teacher told us (to giggles and groans) that pulling out at the last minute isn't a reliable way to prevent pregnancy. It's bad that she didn't know before, but good that she knew afterward.
Streak- The article on the confederate battle flag is amazing to me- this guy is the editor of a baptist paper! I have to say I just don't get the battle flag thing. I'm pretty sure I had relatives who fought in the confederacy. I just don't see any connection between this guy's assertions and reality. I have to be missing something here.
Regarding Limbaugh- Hasn't he been married about three times and doesn't have any kids? I'm not faulting him for those aspects of his life- I'm assuming marriages failing are painful and wouldn't wish it on anyone. I DO wonder, though, and tell me if I'm stretching here, if those credentials shouldn't lend a little humility in the area of claiming to know anything about what's going on with women in general?
Later
BB
Limbaugh is really amazing, isn't he? Becomes addicted to oxycotin, but instead of making himself more compassionate to those battling addiction, it makes him less. Nothing seems to give him humility.
One of the products of the conservative right has been to create these blathering blow hard cardboard people--who unfortunately are listened to.
Don't blame me for Limbaugh. I don't listen to him. To be fair, he (and others) just tapped into a negelcted market.
Steve- Sorry, but the words "fair" and "Limbaugh" in the same paragraph? I guess at least they weren't in the same sentence:-).
BB
Yeah--"neglected market?" The neglected paranoid, racist and stupid? And how was the mainstream media supposed to succor such prejudice?
Well, withdrawn as Fox and CNN are busily working to tap into such markets.
Steve, why did you, personally, nurture young Rush from a tender age to be an arrogant, uncaring blowhard who would suffocate like a beached shark if he weren't immersed in his own hypocrisy?
Why won't anyone think of the children!
Seriously though, I think Limbaugh's market strategy wasn't to go for conservatives (though there is overlap there) so much as blue-collar, working-class people who are frustrated with their lot and looking for either hope, or someone to blame for their situation. The mainstream networks and newspapers, at least ten years ago when I was paying attention and Limbaugh was becoming popular, seemed to me (with four blue-collar grandparents) to be targeted toward the slightly upper end of middle class.
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