Tyranny of ignorance

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Aug 25, 2010 at 07:25:23 AM MST

Her claim that the curriculum process has been completed behind closed doors is, to be polite, a damn lie. Literate Americans can read Board minutes and attend meetings. At the end of the "interview," Allen-Gailushas even makes it clear that it's her fault for not getting involved earlier:

This has opened me up to needing to pay attention more, whereas I never really thought about it before.

To recap, the Board's public meetings and minutes are tyrannical because Allen-Gailushas didn't pay attention to what was going on.

Allen-Gailushas's reasoning for suing OPI is another demonstration of the keen analytical work of the Tea Party and its citizen lawyers. According to Allen-Gailushas:

Because they're [OPI] at the head of the school district and they have not come in to stop what the school board is doing...

Neither is NATO. Why not sue them? They have about the same level of jurisdiction over local curriculum.

You know, this is startlingly familiar to Tei Nash's outburst against Missoula's anti-discrimination ordinance, isn't it? Gin up some passion over a (deliberate?) misinterpretation of the ordinance/curriculum, incorporate it into some wider "culture war," demand the city/county bend its regulations and processes (and the rules of logic) for your complaints, and sue the h*ll out of any government organization who's within arm's reach, all the while complaining about wasted tax money.

Allen-Gailushas' lawsuit is also a nice representation of the conservative Tea Partying. It's all about the Constitution...until the Constitution protects immigrants and Muslims. It's all about government being accountable to the people, unless the people, you know, want to end discrimination against gays and their kids to know about nutrition. It's all about the rule of law, until the rule of law causes poorly written and ill-conceived lawsuits to be tossed from court. It's misplaced rightwing populist ire with racist, homophobic, and xenophobic overtones dressed up as a "movement," and lovingly embraced by a media looking for a clean "he said/she said" dichotomy for its political narrative.

Anyway...keep an eye on Pogie's site. He's obtaining a copy of the lawsuit. Expect hilarity to ensue...

Montana GOP vies for the pedophile vote

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Jul 22, 2010 at 19:01:48 PM MST

Ouch! Is the title of the post fair? It is if you approach issues like the Montana GOP, by taking things out of context and blowing them out of proportion and preying on the fears of everyday voters, it is. Like Breitbart!

So here the state Republican party goes after a sex-ed program in Helena that's not really very controversial -- its "sins" are that it teaches kids about different kinds of households, that there are proper words for genitals, and acknowledges that other kinds of sex, besides vaginal, exist. Obviously the problem here is that right-wingers are apoplectic that kids might learn gays exist and lead happy and productive lives (not to mention, have hot sex). Oh, and the sex ed program emphasizes abstinence...

Only in Fox-News-Speak, this is "graphic" or "explicit" sex! "Teaching kindergarteners graphically about sex"! And it's spreading! Across the state! And only with a majority of Republicans in the legislature can you and your children be protected from these sex-crazed libruls!

Except that, according to the Office of Public Instruction, the state constitution "forbids the Legislature from dictating the details of any kind of school curriculum statewide, leaving such choices to local school boards." So there's that.

If this sounds familiar to you political junkies, it should. Wa-a-a-a-y back in the 2008 presidential election, conservatives tried to make a fuss over Obama's support for a similar sex ed program in Illinois. Time's Ana Marie Cox then:

Obama has supported legislation to teach children about "inappropriate touching;" he's not for handing out cucumbers or bananas or probably even cheetos in show and tell. I imagine that the lessons would be short and involve pointing at a doll and in general be less explicit than a "Suite Life of Zach and Cody" episode.

She then noted that this kind of sex ed for kindergarten that Obama supported (and similar to Helena's) was similar to that of the United Church of Christ! Here's a snippet:

United Church Of Christ Promotes A Sexual Education Curriculum For Kindergartners That Focuses On Helping Children Identify and Avoid Sexual Abuse. "Our Whole Lives K-1 supports parents, teachers and pastors in educating children about birth and sexuality. The program affirms all kinds of families and helps children identify and avoid sexual abuse. Activities include stories, songs, arts and crafts."

So...if Republicans oppose giving kindergarten students the tools to battle sexual abuse...that means, of course, they favor pederasty!

Simple, isn't it?

Some will be offended, while others will not.

by: Matt Singer

Mon Jul 12, 2010 at 08:57:33 AM MST

Some say comprehensive sex education helps to lower teen pregnancy rates and decrease sexually transmitted diseases, while others say it doesn't.

Administrators are expecting many community members to address the board on the draft document at the meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Front Street Learning Center, where public testimony will be taken for the first time on the draft curriculum. Some will voice support of the school's proposed methodology, while others will share their concerns.

In the writer's defense, there are a good several paragraphs with a public health nurse for the county explaining the social science basis for educating children about sex. But the equivocation is mind-boggling.

Meeting details -- where you can speak up -- are available here.

Why Won't These Evil Sluts Have My Kids?

by: Matt Singer

Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 08:40:06 AM MST

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries.

To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won't be any children or grandchildren, so there's that problem solved.

The modern conservative movement really is an odd beast.

More Evidence: Abstinence-Only Tactics May Do More Harm, No Good

by: Matt Singer

Tue Dec 30, 2008 at 09:17:31 AM MST

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

At this point, though, there's really no reason to maintain the charade with sex education. A number of my liberal compatriots interpret ongoing conservative support for abstinence-only policies as an indication that the conservative backers really are only interested in punishing women for having sex. That would be a fair conclusion if we assumed that the decision-making process for deciding what policy to back was rational, but for many of these folks, it is basically just a matter of turning their moral sentiment into a policy statement, outcomes be damned.

Sadly, several years ago, I looked into a Heritage Foundation study defending abstinence-only education. The meat of Heritage's argument was that abstinence was better than birth control or condom usage at preventing STD transmission and pregnancy (data proves it), therefore instructing abstinence-only is good policy. There's still a big missing causal link between teaching abstinence and kids actually abstaining.

As long as teenagers have hormones, they'll have sex. Those rates may rise and fall a bit as mores change, but teenage sex is likely to happen in an educated or uneducated world. Our ability to impact its implications appears to be mostly in our ability to mitigate the negative side effects -- teenage pregnancy and disease transmission.

Note also: there is some evidence that abstinence-only education also encourages anal sex among straight teenage couples. Uneducated anal sex carries a lot of the risks of vaginal sex, plus some others. Driving young people toward higher risk activities (that also are probably generally less likely to result in pleasure) is an odd way of using public policy.

Final thought: I continue to be blown away by the "girls shouldn't be whores" but "boys will be boys" mentality that seems to drive so much of this topic. Honestly, with the presumption that girls are born pure and only tempted by men, you'd think it was us who had eaten the apple. Maybe it is just because of the family I was raised in, but treating the sexual lives of sons and daughters differently creates real problematic dynamics overall.

States Rejecting Abstinence-Only Education Money. Why? It Doesn't Work.

by: Matt Singer

Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 12:14:20 PM MST

Notably, the few reports I've ever read touting the achievement of abstinence-only education do it by noting the recent downtick in teen sex, the resulting downtick in teen pregnancy (which is also partially caused by increasing contraception use), and then asserting that abstinence-only education caused the downtick in sexual activity. It's not exactly what we'd call sound social science.