Today, SIECUS, in partnership with the National Education Association and the National Education Association Health Information Network, is hosting our 6th Annual "Back to School" Briefing on Capitol Hill.  In this briefing, we will be releasing our reviews of three fear-based abstinence-only-until-marriage programs: Reasonable Reasons to Wait (RRTW), Healthy Images of Sex (HIS), and A.C. Green's Game Plan.  Each of these curricula, in one way or another, presents a skewed view of sexuality, relies on outdated or biased information, and has, as its top priority, the goal of promoting one particular life style over all others. 

As we prepared the reviews for our briefing today, there was a flurry of activity as we double and triple checked the quotations and examples we had pulled from the programs.  Some of the examples were so outrageously incorrect or offensive that we were sure we must have read them wrong. Reading some sections of the curricula was like watching Britney Spears drive with her baby on her lap - you know what you saw, but it is so reckless that you hope you must be mistaken.  Sadly, we are not. 

Try this one, for example, where RRTW likens premarital sex to drug and alcohol use and notes that just because other people are doing it, young people should not compromise their values: "No matter how many people accept a dumb idea, it is still a dumb idea," the curriculum states.  Two of the examples used to illustrate this point are slavery and Hitler.  That's right; RRTW compares premarital sex, a choice that the vast majority of Americans make, to owning slaves and exterminating human beings. 

Not to be outdone, HIS compares premarital sex to other "powerful stuff" in a photo montage that includes pictures of a sports car, a syringe, a gun, fire, and a plane about to slam into the World Trade Center.  "If you have sex outside of marriage," the point seems to be, "you are no better than a mass murdering terrorist."  Messages such as this, which are extremely disturbing and offensive, serve no purpose other than to instill feelings of fear and shame into young people, when what they really need is guidance, support, and information. 

Unfortunately, these curricula are short on information, and what is included is often misleading or blatantly wrong. "Any kind of sexual activity can spread STDs from one person to another," says HIS, which includes masturbation, a safe and risk free activity, in its definition of sexual activity.  Of course, the most blatant inaccuracy comes in RRTW which after telling teens that "sexually transmitted diseases affect teenagers' dating relationships. AIDS can kill. It can kill you. It can kill your date," the curriculum goes on to say: "AIDS can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact."  That's just wrong.  But in case students weren't already scared enough, RRTW asks them to name "the percentage of people who will die from AIDS."  The answer: 100%.  There are a lot of things wrong with this statement but let's just start with the obvious - it fails to even mention the role of HIV.  Clearly, the authors of RRTW can't believe that 100% of mankind will die from AIDS.  

While these quotations and examples, by themselves, provide reason enough for any moderately competent school system to yank these curricula from classrooms in a New York minute, they are not the entire problem.  All three of the curricula that we recently reviewed (and the dozens more we have reviewed over the last decade) have a clear agenda: to promote the heterosexual marriage as the only morally acceptable life path. These curricula may be sold as teen pregnancy and STD prevention programs (or worse sex education) but when you really look at them you see that their goal is to promote a conservative social agenda. Not only does this focus instantly exclude any gay and lesbian students who happen to be in the class by telling them they have to wait for sex until marriage, even though in almost every state they are not allowed to marry, but it demeans both women and men, relies on not-so-subtle religious messages, and lessens the worth of any student who might come from a single-parent family. 

Sometimes, when we talk about our reviews of fear-based abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, we are accused of being, well, fear-based - of picking the worst of the worst and taking quotes out of context to support our claims. If only that were true.  We feel that the quotations we highlight are truly representative of the content and tone of these programs, and we include them verbatim in our reviews (spelling mistakes and all).  

In our space here today, we could only give you a very brief idea of what these curricula include, but sincerely hope that you will read the full reviews or shorter summaries on our website at www.communityactionkit.org/reviews. These curricula, and many others just like them, are out there spreading fear and misinformation among young people, and the first step in fighting them is knowing exactly what they say.

Most disturbingly, all of our examples come from programs that received federal funding.  Congress has been educated time and again of the profound problems with these federally funded programs and yet, they continue to fund them.  We are pleased that no increases have been approved for years, but it is time for Congress to work with a new administration to end all funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage initiatives.  Many of us have labored over the past decade to gather the evidence and political cover our leaders need to end this experiment and the time has come to call our policymakers on the carpet.  We've done our part.  Now it's their turn.