I went to high school in a small West Texas town in the mid-90s, at the height of social acceptance of comprehensive sex education.  That height was still incredibly low, and especially so in small West Texas towns.  In an atmosphere like ours, all it takes is one religious nut parent to lose her mind over some perceived slight to her worldview for chaos, in the form of wingnut screeching, reigns upon the high school.  Few will have the guts to stand up to the complainant, because then you're next on the list to have your reputation smeared by the anxiety-ridden parent.  I've seen my town sucked into controversy because a teacher assigned a modern novel with a character who uses a curse word.  (Obviously, English class is a time for only 100% wholesome activities, like the time I heard a group of boys tease a female classmate by talking about their masturbation habits in English class.)  We didn't read the sexy parts of any books assigned, and these boys' behavior proves that by simply pretending sex doesn't exist, you can make sure that teenagers will never figure it out.

That said, the mid-90s were a heady time, and the idea that maybe it would be smart for kids who are having sex to use birth control did make its way past the force field established around the school by fundamentalist Christians with too much time on their hands.   My 10^th grade health class was supposed to cover sex ed, according to the standards set by the state school board, but somehow our teacher never got around to it, because we spent so much time talking about how to brush your teeth and why you should wash your hands after you go to the bathroom.  But despite this glaring omission, we did get some kinds of sex ed through a patchwork of half-hearted attempts by the school administration, usually in direct response to the horrible sexual health outcomes that ravaged our town.

We got the period talk in the 7^th grade in health class.  Our teacher, after explaining menstruation and the mechanics of sexual intercourse, paused and added that if you take the pill, you might want to know you have to take it every day or else it won't work.  Useful information, if far from comprehensive.  A few years later in high school, a syphilis outbreak in our town that apparently touched some high school students led the administration to round up every student and force us to watch a slideshow of pictures of people who had let STDs go for years without getting any treatment, often until they had scarred their genitals past the point of recognition.  This was presented as an inevitable outcome of having sex. We were not told about using condoms for prevention or that if you got tested frequently, doctors could catch and cure many of these diseases early. The rumor we all heard--that you catch syphilis from sex with barnyard animals--was not addressed.  

One year, the high teenage pregnancy rate got to the school administration, and school administrators rounded up all female students and had a doctor explain contraception to us.  He explained what most of us already knew about the birth control pill and condoms.  We sat there in silence, our main question unasked and unanswerable--how do we get these things in a small town without everyone knowing?  How do you buy a packet of condoms without your parents finding out?  The only girls we knew who got the pill convinced their parents that their menstrual problems demanded it.  Was there any other way?  We didn't know, and the school administration gave up trying to teach contraception after that.  

I bring up this long history to point out that these were, sadly, the good old days. As reported earlier here at RH Reality Check, the Texas Freedom Network, in conjunction with researchers from Texas State University, have finished a thorough examination of all but a handful of school districts in Texas and found that 94% of school districts are abstinence-only and 2% have no education at all.   I asked TFN about my old high school, and they confirmed that the district had embraced abstinence-only.  The old, patched-up, half-hearted, usually non-existent sex ed we got would have been better, though--at least they didn't lie to us or pretend that a choice (abstaining until marriage) that only 5% of Americans make is the expected standard and that the rest of us were doomed to a life of depression, suicide, disease, and inability to love.  Now you have a situation where kids who are already parents are being marched through ludicrous role-playing skits about saying no to sex.  The old way was bad, but mostly they stuck to the "First, do no harm" principle, which is better than the current method of actively deceiving young people in the hopes that they will skip condom use and get pregnant or catch an STD as punishment. 

You can read the full report at TFN.  No matter how often you read hair-curling stories about how abstinence-only non-educators will blatantly lie to students, it's still shocking.  The line between trying to scare kids away from sex and sadistically trying to set them up to get STDs is crossed routinely in many of these programs.  

What makes important to people who live outside of Texas is this--textbook publishers use Texas curricula as the national standard, because Texas is the largest purchaser of textbooks in the country.  So even if your state has different standards, they're still probably using Texas textbooks.  In fact, the religious right openly set out to make abstinence-only the standard in Texas, because they knew if they got Texas, they got the nation.  As tempting as it might be for people in blue states to write off my state as a lost cause, I'm afraid it just doesn't work that way.  Like it or not, what happens in Texas happens to all Americans, and this report should be read with that in mind.