Boy howdy. When a bureaucrat turns down millions of dollars you gotta believe the program it is supposed to fund really really sucks.
Yesterday, New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines issued a statement on the department’s website.
The Bush administration’s Abstinence Only Program is an example of a failed national health-care policy directive, based on ideology rather than on sound scientific-based evidence that must be the cornerstone of good public health-care policy.
The New York Times reported:
New York has received roughly $3.5 million a year from the federal government for abstinence-only education since 1998. . . . The state had also spent $2.6 million annually to fund the same programs over the last decade. That money will now be spent on other existing programs for sex education, Dr. Daines said in an interview.
Ten other US states, including California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island, have also decided to rejoin RealityWorld reject the funding.
Then, of course the whining began:
“We’ve seen a lot of attacks on this program,” said Leslee Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, based in South Dakota. “A lot of kids that are abstaining are made to feel as if they are from a Victorian age and they are not with the ‘Sex and the City’ crowd.”
Oooh, attacks! Made to feel as if they are from ‘a Victorian age’ (which one would that be? the one with dinosaurs?)?
Yes, indeedy. The program has been attacked because it doesn’t fucking work! Here is the ever-popular Birth Pangs piece in which we report on the study that called the $1.5 billion abstinence education program ‘a boondoogle of historic proportions’.
In July, the Health Department sent letters to nearly 40 community organizations and hospitals that had received the funding, stating that their contracts would not be renewed. The letter did not mention why the contracts were being canceled.
From our fave hate site, we get this:
John Graham of Catholic Charities in Onondaga County, one of the groups that received state and federal funds to help teenagers choose abstinence, decried the decision.
“We’re very unhappy,” he told the Associated Press. “Refusing the money from the federal government puts a lot of programs in jeopardy.”
“We were having a pretty effective program with the families and children we were working with,” he said. “And now, we’re not able to do that.”
Boo fucking hoo.
Welcome back to RealityWorld, New York.
We *heart* NY.
Okay, in the NYT article it says “… existing state programs include discussion of abstinence.” So what Leslee Unruh is demanding is that only abstinence be taught as an option, because for kids who choose that option, the mandatory exclusion of other options serves as a multi-million support system for them and them only.
Why not just build a colony for those abstinence-choosing kids and house them together, isolated from the rest of society so that they don’t feel ‘Victorian’ or threatened by other people’s choices or even information that is scientifically based? It would be cheaper.
Hello, darlings, it’s BLANCHE, she who writes her name in capitals, and often in the capitol. Pity about the munny, but, really, it’s their own fault. They got all this gelt to teach abstinence and …obviously didn’t. And BLANCHE thinks it’s due to a total lack of imagination. You can’t go zotting around telling people don’t don’t don’t. Don’t this don’t that don’t the next thing and expect hordes to flock to your cause. Don’t doesn’t sell. What you do is find ways to tell people yay, do it, go for it, wowzer! People today do not want grim and dreary, they want to be entertained. In living colour if at all possible. So you get yourself a lovely white dacron tent capable of holding thousands, and then you put up posters and advertise SIX NEW POSITIONS FOR MASTURBATION. You’ll be up to your nose holes in pupils immediately. And up on stage you have gorgeous nubile volunteers, buck naked of course. Some strategically placed cameras send HUGE images to enormous screens so those in the back row can tell what’s happening. You can dare a very VERY brief introductory speil, but don’t go overboard on it, okay, nothing will empty a tent quicker than some pompous git on a soapbox. With the help of the volunteers and camera crew you start to demonstrate various and sundry positions and techniques for self gratification. If people can whack off well, and skillfully, and feel guilt-free while doing it, there’s really no need for missionary position fucking.
You might want to do a voice-over pointing out that it’s much much cheaper to grease your own pud than jump through the hoops of seducing another person. No need for the date at the movie, the hamburger and milkshake after and some grotty fumbling in the back seat or on a sofa or wherever, no worry someone’s folks are going to come home and kick your ass all the way out the front door, no need to pay good money for condoms or birth control pills or…just the person, alone, in the privacy of their own bedroom, with the memory of the white dacron tent and the volunteers. You might make up some pamphlets, with pictures, to remind the ones who are memory deficient.
Get’em all self absorbed. Maybe some small samples of lubricant, scented perhaps, or with some herbal additive to cause that precious tingling sensation. The spin-off options are limited only by the imagination of the organizers.
BLANCHE envisions little booths at the exits, so the recently educated can buy aids and instructive manuals. Scented candles, perhaps, and for those who are rilly rilly in to organics, some zucchini or even small vegetable marrow. Maybe some music CD’s with appropriately glurgy love songs, some pastel tinted rubber gloves (meet momma thumb and her four darlin’ daughters) kind of thing.
Get’em scorin with themselves and they won’t bother with the fumbling and …well, yes, it is a downside that if they get too good at it they’ll never hook up with someone and make babies but once you’ve got’em jackin and whackin the way you want’em to do you can always then pass the Compulsory Pregnancy act and require an offspring every five or six years or pay double on your income tax.
Prolly cut down on all that gang activity, too.