Keeping The GOP Well Funded
by digby
Someone sent an email asking why in the hell Orrin Hatch's absurd abstinence only program is still in a bill that got not one Republican vote. It's a good question:
A little-noticed provision of the health legislation has rescued federal support for a controversial form of sex education: teaching youths to remain virgins until marriage.
The bill restores $250 million over five years for states to sponsor programs aimed at preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by focusing exclusively on encouraging children and adolescents to avoid sex. The funding provides at least a partial reprieve for the approach, which faced losing all federal support under President Obama's first two budgets.
"We're very happy to see that funding will continue so the important sexual health message of risk avoidance will reach American teens," said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. "What better place to see such an important health issue addressed than in the health legislation?"
But the funding was condemned by critics, who were stupefied by the eleventh-hour rescue.
"To spend a quarter-billion dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have already been proven to fail is reckless and irresponsible," said James Wagoner of the Washington group Advocates for Youth. "When on top of that you add the fact that this puts the health and lives of young people at risk, this becomes outrageous."
250 million dollars is not chump change and it goes to support some of the most backward, useless conservative programs in the country. They might as well have funded creationism.
Somebody did this, but nobody wants their fingerprints on it.
But the effort came under mounting criticism when independent evaluations concluded that the approach was ineffective, and evidence began to emerge that the long decline in teen pregnancies was reversing.
As part of Obama's first budget, Congress approved a request for more than $110 million for a new "teenage pregnancy prevention" initiative that would fund only programs that have been "proven effective through rigorous evaluation," effectively excluding abstinence programs.
The initiative includes $25 million for new, innovative programs that could potentially embrace those encouraging abstinence. A University of Pennsylvania researcher reported last month that a carefully designed, morally neutral abstinence-focused approach can work. But the program does not earmark funding for programs focused on maintaining virginity.
During the health legislation debate in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) added $50 million in annual funding for five years to states for abstinence programs -- a provision that survived the tumultuous process that ensued.
[...]
Critics, however, maintained that there was no reason to continue funding any programs, given the lack of evidence of their effectiveness and speculated that the money survived as part of the effort to win conservative Democratic support for the legislation.
Who was holding out for abstinence only funding? And why aren't they loudly crowing about their success? More pertinently perhaps, to whom are they quietly crowing?
This is yet another example of using uteruses as a bargaining chip. Abstinence only education is a total waste of money --- money that could be used to fund contraception for poor people, provide training for doctors to learn how to do abortions (which many medical schools don't even teach anymore) or to fund family planning clinics. It's not as if there wasn't a better use for the money.
And on a political level it's so stupid I can't even fathom what they were thinking. The "abstinence-only" industry is part of the GOP patronage machine, designed to funnel money into the hands of supporters. It's bad enough that both parties are crawling over each other to get a piece of the Wall Street/defense contractor money. That the Democrats are now voting to defund groups like ACORN and funding Republicans patronage is just frosting on the cake.
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