Texas GOP Lawmakers Divert HIV Funds to Abstinence Education Program
Texas Republicans voted to divert funds from an HIV screening program into abstinence education Tuesday night, during an often tense and uncomfortable debate that got too personal for some lawmakers.
Texas has the third-highest HIV infection rate in the country as well as the fifth-highest teen pregnancy rate and highest repeat teen pregnancy rate, but Republican state Rep. Stuart Spitzer, a surgeon from North Texas, said his “goal is for everybody to be abstinent until they’re married.”
“My goal is for everybody to be HIV/AIDS free,” countered state Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Houston), who peppered Spitzer with questions about Texas’ high HIV and STI rates, and opposed Spitzer’s plan to move $3 million from an HIV and STI screening program into abstinence education.
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Abstaining From the Truth
Sex Education as Ideology
The scientific studies have not stopped the wave. Abstinence education is a tool of ideological management that is now well established in American culture and social policy. We can identify those elements that have helped to institutionalize the campaign. What began as isolated projects by individuals in the 1980s has grown into an elaborate network of people, places, and paraphernalia. Over 900 federally funded programs now exist,20 generating new and revised curricula, videos, and training materials, as well as supporting instructors, administrators and the organizations to house them.
The federally funded infrastructure includes parachurch ministries like Focus on the Family, crisis pregnancy centers, advocacy organizations like the Abstinence Clearinghouse, technical assistance centers for dealing with federal grants, and even a trade organization with a lobbying presence in Washington, the National Abstinence Education Association. While the level of federal funding for abstinence education has not reached that of another school-based prevention program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education or DARE, which hit the $1 billion per year mark in 2001,21 it has come a long way toward being institutionalized.
Federal funding for abstinence programs began with the passage of the American Family Life Act (AFLA) in 1981 granting a modest $4 million for “chastity” programs for teens, a response to family planning efforts to prevent teen pregnancies. With annual increases since 1997 and the establishment of two other grants programs, including sizable sums for community-based programs ($113 million in 2007), federal funding has totaled over $1.5 billion, financing a well-heeled abstinence education industry.22 Without this support, abstinence-only programs would not be as commonly used as they are today (in about 25 percent of schools, according to their supporters).