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Debate Over Abstinence-Only Programs ‘Latest Chapter’ In Battle Over U.S. Sex Education, Newsweek Reports
November 03rd, 2009
The U.S.’ “recent experience with abstinence-only sex education is merely the latest chapter in our long, sometimes ridiculous … history of efforts to control humankind’s most basic drive,” Johannah Cornblatt writes in a Newsweek article examining the history of sex education. Organized sex education first gained attention during the urbanization movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, accordiong to Cornblatt. Later, “rampant” cases of sexually transmitted infections during World War I prompted the federal government to begin educating soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea, she writes.
Over the next 30 years, sex education “exploded,” and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States was founded in 1964 “in part to challenge the hegemony of the American Social Hygiene Association (now called the American Social Health Association), which had dominated sex education curriculum development,” according to Cornblatt. She reports that “some of the greatest resistance to sex ed arose during the sexual revolution of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” when the issue became politicized “as religious conservatives built a movement based, in part, on their opposition to sex instruction in the public schools.” The Christian Crusade, the John Birch Society and similar groups began attacking “SIECUS and sex education overall for promoting promiscuity and moral depravity.” Janice Irvine, author of “Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States,” said that religious conservatives in the late 1960s “began using sex ed to their political advantage” through the use of “really scary rhetoric” on what students were being taught in classrooms. Cornblatt writes, “In school districts across the country, groups of parents started protesting sex ed programs.”
Advocates of comprehensive sex education “found their position strengthened” when the HIV/AIDS pandemic began in the 1980s. Every state had passed mandates for HIV/AIDS education, “sometimes tied to general sex ed and sometimes not,” by the mid-1990s, Cornblatt writes. Conservatives responded by “launch[ing] a movement to rebrand sex education as ‘abstinence education,’” and religious conservatives played a role in adding abstinence-education provisions to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, meaning that for the first time, the federal government “directed tens of millions of dollars to abstinence-education programs,” she says (Cornblatt, Newsweek, 10/28).
Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women’s Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.
© 2009 The Advisory Board Company. All rights reserved.
Obama Lifts US Travel Ban On HIV-Infected; Updated AIDS Bill Puts New Focus On Testing
November 03rd, 2009
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) today lauded President Barack Obama for lifting a 22 year-old ban prohibiting HIV-positive foreigners from traveling to the US. The US was one of only twelve countries with such a travel ban. Obama announced repeal of the ban after signing the legislation renewing the Ryan White CARE Act, the federal law that authorizes the primary source of funding for AIDS care and services nationwide. The updated CARE Act, which Obama signed earlier today in Washington with the mother of Ryan White in attendance, places a newfound emphasis on testing, calling for five million HIV tests to be done annually.
“President Obama deserves praise for lifting the 22 year-old ban on travel to the US by HIV-infected people or those living with AIDS,” said Michael Weinstein, President of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “This ban only served to reinforce stigma against people living with HIV/AIDS, and its repeal is long overdue. The travel ban was an enormous black eye on US humanitarian efforts such as PEPFAR, the US’ widely respected global AIDS program. With the repeal of this ban, major international AIDS conferences may once again be held here in this country, something that has not happened throughout the ban. In addition, the updated version of the Ryan White CARE Act that Obama signed into law today provides another watershed moment: the bill puts a newfound-and crucial-emphasis on HIV testing, with directives that five million HIV tests be done annually. At present, fully one-quarter of the 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the US are currently unaware of their HIV status. Stepped up testing, as this bill requires, with linkage to treatment when needed, should go a long way to help address the problem of people unaware of their HIV status unwittingly passing on their infection to others.”
Source
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)