One of the illusions about comprehensive sex education is that it is, well, a comprehensive treatment of the science of human sexuality. Dr. Miriam Grossman, who has upfront and personal knowledge of the psychological and physiological challenges of sexually involved collegians from her years as a campus psychiatrist at UCLA, does more than beg to differ with the reigning orthodoxy. She shows the difference between good science and contemporary sex education in her new book You’re Teaching My Children What? She’ll summarize her conclusions at a Heritage Foundation lecture today at noon.
Grossman’s experience with the inexperience, in terms of actual medical understanding, of “experienced” college coeds prompted her to delve into the web sites of the leading comprehensive sex educators, from Planned Parenthood and SIECUS (the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States) to Advocates for Youth and Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice. What she did not find there is as interesting as what she found. Instead of accurate treatment of such issues as condom effectiveness and the high health risk of particular sexual practices, the sites are replete with exhortations to adolescents to ‘explore” their sexuality – ideology rather than information.
Perhaps most compelling is the disparate impact Dr. Grossman documents for girls and women from today’s “hook-up” culture. The topics range from the heightened cellular-level susceptibility of adolescent girls and younger women to sexually transmitted infections and diseases, to the biochemical ingenuity of the expanded range of viruses and bacteria today’s supercharged Petri Dishes of behavior have nurtured, to the rapidly bending fertility curve that many 20-somethings have been schooled to believe does not exist. Grossman does not shy away from either the medical realities or the moral implications, but her primary message is to the sexual messengers: tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
It’s a message that young people, the subjects of a massive national experiment in sexual liberation, urgently need to hear. Even more, it’s a messageSe that the cultural mangers of that experiment need to heed.
Fact Checking the White House: Obama’s Health Reform Doesn’t Help Small Business
Author: Gerrit LansingIf the root cause of the problem is high health care costs, the White House’s solution only makes tings worse.
President Obama’s health reform will impact thousands of small business owners who are creating the jobs and wages for most Americans. These taxes will hurt small businesses by keeping them from expanding and adding new jobs. It will hurt workers by stagnating wage growth or even eliminating jobs.
New research from Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis reveals these new taxes could mean 400,000 employees could lose their job each year. Spending and new taxes will not be the way to bend the health care cost-curve downward. It will only exacerbate the problems businesses already face. Watch:
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