Remember, folks, when you keep kids from learning about sex, they wonât have sex! Thatâs totally how it works!
âŚsays every conservative that has completely forgotten what it means to be a teenager, ever.
Will they glue in a page which lists all the ridiculous stories that kids make up when they donât understand how actual birth control works? âYou wonât get pregnant if you stand up right afterwards, all the sperm will fall outâ is a fun one.
If we pretend something is not there it goes away, right?
âGet back in the campaign bus, Bristol!â
Thatâs not the point. The point is that sex is supposed to have consequences. If you can have free sex, why would you ever get married, have kids, and keep society functioning? Thatâs the thought process here. Accidental pregnancies arenât a mistake, theyâre a messages that itâs time to grow up and get a job you slacker. Theyâre a feature.
There I was expecting it to be something about evolution. They somehow managed to be even dumber than I expected. As a scientist, I am hereby revising my expectations downward accordingly in the face of empirical evidence, no matter how unhappy it makes me.
Yeah, I like how organized religion acts like they OWN sex and you need their permission to have any. Who benefits from that? Organized religion.
Oh, thisâll go over wellâŚ
âI think a page has been torn outâŚâ
âOh, yes, the legislature decided they didnât want you reading that.â
Removing the page was the right move. You canât say: â________ is to males as tubal ligation is to _________â. The answer is undefined. It could be: vasectomy is to males as tubal ligation is to females, but it could also be: boys is to males as tubal ligation is to sterilization procedures, or fish wrangler is to males as tubal ligation is to things to do on a Tuesday afternoon. Rip it out.
I think itâs interesting that while the page mentions that complete abstinence is the only totally affective method, itâs not listed in table 28.7 where they compare âused perfectlyâ versus âtypicalââŚ
My guess is that while used perfectly, abstinence produces zero pregnancies per 100 women per year; typically, itâs much higher than that.
Iâve heard that proposed, in all seriousness, as a more or less fundamental distinction between the âconservativeâ and âliberalâ normative models:
The one holds that it is children that make adults (and so having the sex without the kids is the greatest possible act of irresponsibility); while the other holds that adults make children (and so failure to defer the kids until youâve achieved other markers of maturity and stability is the greatest possible act of irresponsibility).
The nasty little punch line, of course, is that both of these philosophies are on a bit of a collision course with contemporary economic reality: The length of time, and amount of money, necessary to hit âentry level adulthoodâ has been climbing at a decent clip for quite some time now.
If your approach to family planning tacks âconservativeâ, this involves learning the hard way just how realistic it isnât to support a family with a high school education (much less an incomplete one, and donât even think about making it a single income householdâŚ)
If your approach tacks âliberalâ you have better odds of keeping children from interfering with human capital accumulation; but your odds of being established enough to start before your case starts attracting fertility specialists arenât getting any better.
All this says to me is that conservatives continue to live in fear of the world as it is. Iâm halfway amazed that they let the kids have any book thatâs not the bible. Because, you know, ideas and shit.
This is a terrible one page on contraception, which bends over backwards to accommodate stupid views on the subject, and theyâre still throwing a fit over it.
It hits almost every sex-negative trope in the book. Just look:
âsafe sexâ in scare quotes- not to introduce the actual term âsafer sexâ, just to bash the concept.
Listing abstinence as a birth control method. You know, like ânot playing footballâ as a form of sport.
Calling Vasectomies and tubal ligations âpermanentâ then going on to contradict itself with data
Manipulating the figures in that table to make barrier methods look as reliable as withdrawal
Lack of data or citations for those figures, especially the inflated âtypical useâ column (which conveniently ignores the typical use effectiveness of abstinence)
Falsely stating that emergency contraception causes abortion. It does not.
If anything, tearing that page out and making the kids find out real info on the web is an improvement.
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
Can we include âfemale bodies have a way of shutting that downâ too?
That little bait-and-switch is outrageously dishonest; but impressively well crafted as a propaganda talking point:
Just distract the audienceâs attention for an instant, slip an implied tautology past them (abstinence is a wholly effective method of birth control because all deviations from âused perfectlyâ are by definition non-abstinence and thus donât count as failures), and suddenly the fact that the methods actually studied by team medicine have numbers and statistical expected failure rates and whatnot looks like a scary weakness. Elegant.
Even better, it draws attention right away from theâŚpotentially messy questionsâŚthat would arise if people started sniffing around at the numbers regarding people who intended, but did not succeed at, abstinence(which are harder to measure rigorously than failure rates for IUDs or the like; but a large enough effect that even a social scientist could probably beat some statistical significance out of it.
Sorry buddy - nobodyâs going to pay you to go to high school!
Rachel Maddow put up this site as a response:
Teachers werenât allowed to give us medicine, so whenever a student would complain to my history teacher about having a headache sheâd say, âWell, you could take some of the aspirin thatâs in the unlocked right-hand corner drawer of my desk. Right there on top. Iâm going to step out for a minute.â
A similar approach could be used with information.
