Today responsible, evidence-based sex education could get a vote on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. State Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, has filed his Education Works! bill, HB 1624, as an amendment to important fiscal legislation pending in the House.
The amendment, which the Texas Freedom Network supports, would direct school districts that teach sex education to provide evidence-based, age-appropriate, comprehensive information on both contraception and abstinence.
Current state law directs school district that teach sex education to emphasize abstinence, but districts may choose to offer more comprehensive information on responsible pregnancy and disease prevention. But a 2009 TFN Education Fund report showed that more than 94 percent of school districts across the state taught abstinence-only when it comes to sex education. About another 3 percent taught nothing at all. That’s appalling, especially in a state with one of the highest teen birth rates in the nation. In fact, teen childbearing in Texas costs taxpayers about $1 billion annually.
If this common-sense amendment comes to a vote, we will have a chance to see which legislators put the health and future of Texas youth ahead of blind ideology and recognize that abstinence-only policies have been an enormously expensive failure for the state.
We’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for this info! Could you tell people the bill number and author, so that people could call their representatives and express support for Castro’s amendment?
EP,
The bill is SB 1581 — one of the fiscal matters bills. Rep. Pitts is the House sponsor.
No way anything this sensible is going to pass the Texas Lege.
Yes TFN.
But you have to deal with a market supply problem. Responsible, comprehensive sex education that is well taught, well received, and well acted upon will reduce teen pregnancy to near zero in Texas. This will cut off the supply of adoptable, lily-white babies for lily-white barren married couples in the Christian fundamentalist and conservative evangelical community in Texas. After all, no upstanding Christan should have to adopt a black or Hispanic baby. That would just be…well…unthinkable. “Fred, he might look sort of cute, but I just shudder at the thought of cleaning that negro poop out of his diapers.”
Abstinence-only sex education guarantees that those white babies will keep flowing into the adoption pipeline in high numbers. But let us ask a question here. Is it Christian to support a system that assures that out-of-wedlock pregnancies will occur so Christian couples can profit by receiving the fruits of fornication. I sometimes get this vision of a teenager with spread legs, the hands of hungry WASP jackals poised at the crotch in pass reception position, and two white people with minds focused totally on the incipient emergence—and with relative indifference to the pain of the girl giving birth.
Some of you might think that statement is ridiculous. However, I once worked for a social services agency where I was “set upon” by an absolutely rabid barren white woman who was desperate beyond belief for a white child to adopt. In fact, that woman lives right up the street from me now. The Bible says that a barren womb is the deepest and most abiding of all hungers. I sort of “pooh-poohed” that until this woman found out that I had a pregnant teenager in a class I was teaching. She then initiated a relentless private campaign to get that child. She hounded me nearly to death about it. She was on the phone to my boss and her boss, and anyone of influence who could put pressure on them and me. Any route to that child would do. She made a bloody spectacle of herself for weeks and behaved like some sort of depraved psychotic. I was lucky to keep my job—and to this day—I am not actually sure that I did keep it.
Therefore, I have very little sympathy for the racist evangelical white couple that absolutely must have a white baby for adoption. Preying on wounded teenage children and supporting policies that will assure that they get pregnant so you can acquire a “product” to meet your needs sort of turns my stomach. I would rather that you just sat down and considered the possibility that you might be barren because the Lord wants you that way—or maybe adopt that black or Hispanic baby.
No. It just sounds like Hell.
Check it out:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=91834&page=1
Salient Quote:
“Some adoption professionals said the reason for the difference in cost for adopting white babies as opposed to babies of other races or ethnicities is that there are fewer white infants available and there is more demand for them.”
Isn’t that amazing? Abstinence only sex education is spurring a high birth rate among white teenage mothers, and it is still not enough to meet the demand for adoptable white babies. No wonder they are now coming out against contraceptives too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As George W. Bush used to say, “It’s the market forshes.” No. That’s not a typo.