Scott Southworth: When is a District Attorney Accountable for Crimes Against the People?

It's a long-standing practice for ambitious Districts Attorney to use their position to further political careers.  Sometimes they can do so with good cause, using the law to prosecute actual criminals, simultaneously protecting the public interest and building a name for themselves.

But some DAs use the law to further their personal political ideology in pursuit of personal gain, no matter the cost in other people's lives. Va. State District Attorney Ken Cucinelli is one example. Wisconsin's Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth is yet another.

You remember Mr. Southworth? He's the DA who, in April, helpfully sent a memo to five Juneau county public schools threatening to criminally prosecute teachers for contributing to the delinquency of a minor if they taught comprehensive sex ed. The kind of comprehensive sex ed supported by the American Association of Pediatricians and the Institute of Medicine, among a few.  The same comprehensive sex ed mandated by law in Wisconsin's Health Youth Act, which was passed by the Wisconsin state legislature after six years of work, supported by parents and signed into law by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle last February.  In short, it's a real law.

After Mr. Southworth began his misguided crusade, both Governor Doyle and the Legislative Council set the record straight.  They issued memos and statements confirming that teachers providing medically-accurate and age-appropriate information about preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections in a curriculum developed by the Human Growth and Development Advisory Committee could not be prosecuted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  It's a false accusation based on false claims and lies.

Governor Doyle put it succinctly to the Wisconsin State Journal:

"It's really an unusual argument to make, 'Follow the law and I'll prosecute you.'"

Now, the cheese curds have "thickened" so to speak.

First, with desperate efforts underway by the far right in every state to get their candidates elected, extremists on the right are becoming increasingly outrageous. In July, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican candidate for Governor, publicly praised Scott Southworth for his efforts to keep Wisconsin classrooms free of programs based on peer-reviewed research and programmatic evaluations and shown to prevent teen pregnancy and infections.

In April, Walker said:

“I may not be a lawyer, but I know that it’s not just the law you’re standing up for, it’s the rights of families and individual communities.”

Well, he may not be a lawyer, but since when does it take a law degree to understand that the District Attorney is supposed to uphold the law, not misinterpret or re-interpret or ignore it according to personal whim and ideology?

And, given that the law was passed by the legislature, signed by the Governor, approved at the local level by school boards, and supported by parents across the state, exactly which "families and individual communities" is it for which Mr. Southworth is standing up?  This is a blatant case of arrogance: "It's my office and I'll abuse the law if I want to."

Southworth is currently being sued by One Wisconsin Now, a watchdog group, for violating Wisconsin's open records law by intentionally withholding "political email communication sought in an open records request."

Apparently, after being asked by One Wisconsin Now (OWN) to turn over email and other records regarding his threats against teachers, Southworth denied having been in email communication with political advocacy groups about his interpretation of the Healthy Youth Act.  OWN also asked if Southworth had shared his threatening letter to the teachers with outside groups or individuals associated with anti-sex ed political positions before sending it to the schools in question. In other words, was he collaborating with anti-choice, anti-sex-ed advocacy groups and (ab)using his office to further their positions as well as his own? He denied this.  Now however,  documents obtained by OWN after an open records request suggest Southworth had in fact shared the documents with outside groups and also had been working with state Senator Glenn Grothmann, another longtime opponent of reproductive health care and comprehensive sex ed who launched an unprecedented effort to thwart passage of the Healthy Youth Act’s by intimidating supporters and distributing misinformation about the bill’s content and effect.

Sound familiar?  Kinda like the health reform debate, the ab-only debate at the federal level and in other states, the misinformation about abortion care.....you get the picture.

Meanwhile, despite being asked by Governor Doyle to desist, Southworth continues to spread misinformation. Just last week, for example, on September 2nd, the Mauston School Board and the local Human Growth and Development Advisory Committee recommended implementation of a comprehensive approach to sex education.

Among other things, the Healthy Youth Act states that schools choosing to teach sex education in Wisconsin must include, "the health benefits, side effects, and proper use of contraceptives and barrier methods."

The Juneau County Star Times reported that "Following a third and final meeting of the School District of Mauston's Human Growth and Development Advisory Committee, chairperson and school nurse Donna McGinley said that minor changes would bring the district's sex education curriculum into compliance with the Healthy Youth Act."

Southworth told the Star Times that the Mauston School District committee's claims are either deceptive to the public or "flagrantly against the law," and questioned the district's handling of instruction regarding contraception.  I leave you to read the article itself because his argument is completely incoherent.

Meanwhile, the original reasons for passing the Healthy Youth Act are urgent reminders of how dangerous are the political games played with the lives of teens for the benefit of unprincipled seekers of power.  Wisconsin’s average teen birth rate remains at 30.9 births per 1,000 teens, now stagnating after significant declines in the 1990s. The average rate of Chlamydia infections (the most common STD) for the entire Wisconsin population is 371 incidents per 100,000. For Wisconsin teens ages 15 to 19, the average rate is 1,806 cases per 100,000. The combined rate of four sexual transmitted diseases (Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis and genital herpes) among teens in this age group increased 53 percent in the period from 1997 to 2007. Almost 20 percent of all new HIV cases in Wisconsin occur in young people ages 15 to 24.

Advocates point out that the situation is no better in Juneau County, center of Southworth's jihad against sex education. Indeed they are worse. The teen birth rate in the county is 35.3 per 1000 teens and less than 40 percent of teens who give birth finish high school. Their children are nine times more likely to live in poverty than those who have finished school and had time to enter adulthood. Moreover, the state health department estimates that Wisconsin spends $177 million annually just on the direct medical costs of infections among youth ages 15 to 24.

Southworth apparently seeks to return his county, and gubernatorial candidate Walker and State Senator Grothmann to return the state to the "good ol' days" of abstinence-only-until marriage programs, the results of which, it turns out in addition to the statistic noted above were: 

• An increase in the share of Wisconsin high school students who reported having had sexual intercourse from 37 percent in 2003 to 45 percent in 2007, after a prior period of decline.

• A decline in condom use among sexually-active youth over the same period that policies supported an abstinence-only approach. And stagnation in the earlier declines in teen birth rates.

In short, Southworth's agenda puts teens at immediate risk of life-threatening and life-altering conditions simply to serve his own political and ideological agenda and against the wishes of school boards, parents, the voters and elected officials. In light of the public health crisis confronting Wisconsin teens, it is clear that providing accurate sex ed to teens is a moral issue, a health issue, a human rights issue and an economic issue. But the conduct of Southworth, Walker and Grothmann reveals that extremist politicians will stop at nothing to keep medically-accurate, age-appropriate information out of Wisconsin schools.

I am frankly at a loss as to how these people are any better than the Taliban. They deride research, spread lies, seek to frighten and intimidate people to promote their own ideology, seek to keep teens uneducated about their bodies--with gravely disproportionate consequences for girls--and denigrate teachers who do their job. Southworth, Walker, Grothmann, Cucinneli and others like them are nothing more than opportunists operating under the title of "District Attorney." 

The real crimes are being commited by the District Attorney himself.

Follow Jodi Jacobson on Twitter, @jljacobson