Sex (Mis)Education: Kanute-like Bush demands that the tide stop coming in

Nicholas Kristoll has a good Op-Ed piece in today's NY Times regarding the Bush budget priorities regarding sex education. According to Kristoff, amidst the sea of cuts in other domestic spending (on the grounds of of "ineffieciency" and/or "duplication"), "one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It's "abstinence only" sex education[!]"

Note, we are not talking about here about teaching the advantages of abstinence backed-up with education on contraception. We are talking about sex educatiuon that ignores contraception (even the rhythmn method) altogether and preaches only abstinence. Apparently, the Bushies believe that refusing to inform high schoolers about contraception is an efficient means of battling pre-marital sex, unwanted pregnancies and abortion, all of which it also comdemns.

Kirstoff sums up these "efficiencies" with some comparative statistics:

Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.

The theory of abstinenece only programs is that, if we tell kids about all of the bad things that can happen to them if that engage in pre-marital sex but deprive them of reliable information on any ways other than abstinence to prevent those bad things from happening, kids will be scared out of having sex before marriage. Could any theory possibly be more preposterous?