Abstinence-only-until-marriage program have always been more about marriage than they are about sex. Though they are often billed as replacements for comprehensive sexuality education or as teen pregnancy or STD prevention programs, in truth, they are more focused on promoting marriage than preventing anything.
SIECUS reviewed the five curricula in the Choosing the Best series as well as a new supplemental curriculum produced by WAIT Training and found that the marriage mandate is pervasive. a
According to these curricula, everybody wants to and should get married. Choosing the Best SOUL MATE starts by asking students “Why do over 80% of teens have a goal of being happily married?”
The author never does say where he gets that statistic. Instead, the curriculum goes on to explain why marriage is good. It describes marriage as the “super-glue that holds a relationship together as it matures” and says it reduces abandonment issues, fosters trust, and encourages resolving conflicts and disagreements.
Maybe this is true in some marriages but there are certainly married couples who still grapple with trust and abandonment issues for example. Moreover, given the high rate of divorce (which the curriculum readily acknowledges), it is clear that marriage in and of itself does not necessarily encourage couples to resolve conflicts or disagreements.
WAIT Training gets even more specific in handout titled “The Good Stuff of Marriage” that includes such assertions as:
Married couples seem to build more wealth on average than singles or cohabitating couples
marriage is associated with better health and lower rates of injury and disability for both men and women
Healthy marriages appear to reduce the risk that adults will either be the perpetrator or the victim of a crime
Note the abundant use of qualifiers: “seems to build,” “appears to increase,” and “is associated with.” What the authors deliberately fail to include is a discussion of how these benefits may be linked to other variables besides marriage and how other relationships may generate some of the same benefits.
Marriage is also hailed as the solution to unintended pregnancy and STDs. In the unit on HIV, Choosing the Best LIFE says this: “The only way to eliminate 100% of the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS sexually is to be abstinent until marriage, marry an uninfected partner and both people must remain faithful in the marriage relationship.”
There is certainly truth to this statement; if two individuals enter into a monogamous relationship when they are uninfected, stay faithful to each other, and both avoid contracting HIV through other means such as infected needles, they will remain HIV free. The key to this arrangement, however, is the lifelong monogamous relationship. Whether or not these two individuals are legally married is irrelevant from a public health perspective.
Even some of the stories used in the curricula prove that a wedding ring is not sufficient protection.
I was rushed to the hospital with intense abdominal pain. Emergency surgery revealed such an extensive infection that my uterus, tubes and ovaries all had to be removed. My husband of six months had infected me with gonorrhea, which he had contracted from a ‘one-night stand’ prior to our engagement. Our dreams of biological children will never be realized.
It is entirely possible that the narrator of this story followed the advice given by Choosing the Best LIFE and remained abstinent until her wedding night. Her exposure to gonorrhea proves that she would have been better served by a curriculum that provided her with information on how STDs are transmitted, how they can be prevented, and the need for all partners to get tested. Moreover, both she and her husband would have benefited from skills-based lessons on communications around sexual health.
Instead, the curricula focus on marriage. Choosing the Best SOUL MATE includes exercises designed to help kids be good at marriage. For example, students are asked to pack their “marriage survival kit” by selecting five items from a list of 18. Possible items include “a commitment to working to maintain and improve your relationship,” “set of cookbooks,” “framed copy of marriage license and best wedding photograph,” “Book: ‘What Wives Wish Husbands Knew About Women,’” and “phone number of the nearest florist.”
The lesson here, that communication and commitment are critical to a healthy marriage is not a bad message for young people to learn. Still, given that these students are a decade away from the average age of first marriage, it seems silly to focus a lesson on communication solely on marriage. These are skills that young people should learn because they can help them in future friendships and relationships regardless of whether they ever marry.
Unfortunately, the only time the curricula discuss other relationships is when they are explaining why such relationships are inferior.
SOUL MATE includes a lesson on living together called, “Cohabitating: Sex without strings, relationships without rings.” It begins the lesson by saying “A majority of young people feel it is a good idea to live together before getting married to find out if they are really compatible and thus avoid the risk of divorce or being ‘trapped in an unhappy marriage.’” It never does say exactly why this seemingly reasonable opinion is not.
Instead, it just reiterates that cohabitation is wrong, that couples who live together will not have happy marriages, and even suggests that those who choose to do so have inherent character flaws: “Unwed couples living together may have problems making and keeping commitments.”
WAIT Training takes aim at some other family structures and suggests that nothing but two-parent marriage will work: “Teens in both one-parent and remarried homes typically display more deviant behavior and commit more delinquent acts than do teens whose parents stayed married. Studies show that two married, biological parents have the means and the motivation to appropriately monitor and discipline boys in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will pose a threat to the social order.”
Let’s just put aside the fact that the authors called half their class a potential threat to the social order —this quote reveals the rigidity of WAIT Training’s ideas about marriage because it asserts that families with parents who have remarried or parents who adopt or foster children, for example, cannot successfully raise boys.
While these discussions are aimed at directing the future life choices of young people, many students will likely see the implications toward their own family structures. It is unfair and potentially harmful to suggest to young people—who as children have no control over their current familial situation—that their families are any less valuable than others.
This discussion on family structure brings us to the curricula’s complete failure to acknowledge gay and lesbian students and families.
A number of the Choosing the Best curricula actually have as their purpose helping young people develop healthy relationships with members of the opposite sex. And, WAIT Training uses its lessons on brain development to explain why young people feel a “strong attraction to the opposite sex.” All of the curricula simply ignore the possibility of same-sex couples or homosexual individuals; all stories, video clips, references, and activities revolve around heterosexual relationships.
In Choosing the Best JOURNEY, for example, a lesson on “Developing the Best Relationships” starts with videos about heterosexual couples. Students are then divided into separate groups of guys and girls: “Ask the guy group to write down the top five qualities they are looking for in a girl and what they think the girls are coming up with [top five qualities they are looking for in a boy].” The girl group is asked the reverse.
This exercise leaves no room for young people who are attracted to members of the same sex. There is no reason for such discrimination, the same brainstorm could occur simply by asking young people in mixed-gender groups to come up with a list of what they are looking for in a romantic partner.
By refusing to be inclusive, the author is showing a clear bias against same-sex couples, and curricula written exclusively for heterosexual students are not appropriate for a classroom setting.
Contrary to the curricula’s presentation – the marriage imperative is not a universally held value. There are 98 million adults in this country who are classified as single because they have never married, are divorced, widowed, or cohabitating. It is not the place for educational programs to tell these adults that their relationships are inferior any more than it is their place to tell young people that they must marry.
Students would be better served by programs that allow them to think critically about relationships, make decisions based on their values and the values of their families, and learn skills that will help them regardless of what relationships they chose.
