Nice catch - Abstinence only education is the BIGGEST waste of taxpayer dollars out there.

There is no shortage of contestants for "second biggest waste of money by Bush and Republicans afer the war in Iraq." I haven't researched the match, but "money wasted on Medicare Part D due to their insistence on involving private insurers and refusing to negotiate with drug companies" and "additional interest on national debt caused by Bush tax cuts for rich people" have to be at the top.

But for sheer, mind-numbing, facially apparent, incontestable stupidity so huge it momentarily robs you of the power of speech, you simply cannot beat abstinence only education. A billion dollars. Not a huge part of the federal budget these days, but, still, a billion dollars. The list of really useful, important things we could have done with with that billion dollars is so long, it just sickens me.

And, yeah, the Iraq war would have been the obvious way to go with this one, but for the fact I'm totally serious. I really do think he's sending a coded message to America's tragically beleagured and ineffective health teachers, "hold on, help is on the way."

Beyond that, though, abstinence only educaton has, to my mind, always been one of the flashing red danger signals about the basically totalitarian mindset of the people in this administration. Orwell was right about totalitarian regimes and sex. (As he was about most things, actually. One of the intellectual heros of the twentieth century, Orwell was. Few appreciate how much he did, single handedly, with just his pen, to stem, or at least slow, the totalitarian tide simply by leading people to pay attention to it.)

Regardless of whether they are left, right, theocratic or atheistic, totalitarian regimes are invariably obsessed with sex and zealously seek to repress every last manifesation of sexuality and every form of sexual behavior beyond the minimum necessary to maintain reproduction. It's an inevitable outgrowth of the desire to meddle and control that marks the totalitarian mindset and essential to obtaining the kind of social control necessary to accomplish their other objectives. That's why abstinence only education has, in my mind, always been of a piece with their obsession with suppressing pornography and with gays and gay marriage.

And, of course, it's also a function of thoroughly diseased dirty-mindedness that seems to be pervasive among those who are most ostantatiously prudish.

I am so fucking disgusted that my secret radio did not work and I missed these hidden messages. I'm certain that he changed his frequency and did it specifically to keep me out!!!

What an outrage!!!

I ain't votin' for that guy. Also, did you know he's white?

Geeesh

Riiiight! and the $500,000,000 dollars that Obama proposes to "teach " faith based organizations how to apply for those federal funds is not a boondoggle? (in the same way his private/public housing developments in Chicago were a boondoggle for his friends). Get real. If faith based programs were going to solve our problems they would have done so by now having been around for 2000 years already. This is another warmed over repug idea that has failed and Obama has gotten behind.

You're right that abstinence programs don't work.

A Christian college recently had a spate of oral gonorrhea. As it turns out, the Christian kids had been channeling Bill Clinton: fellatio and cunnilingus aren't sex, right? Not in the biblical, missionary sense, right?

These kids are future republican lawyers.

Good catch, dear Steve. Perhaps this is simply a function of the fact that I am a pious Catholic, but I was never much distressed by the idea of partnerships between Government and faith-based organizations, but I am actively appalled by the actual partnerships that we have seen emerge under this administration.

If a group of prayerful people want to offer social services, it is not obviously a bad thing to my mind if the government helps them to do so; the one thing that we really must insist on, however, is results. If the "services" which these folks offer benefit no one, then this is not a partnership, it is merely a swindle. No program has shown a less impressive set of results than abstinence only education.

Even a serious Catholic like myself, who admires chastity as a virtue, will be glad to see this failure come to an end. Why pay people to lower teen birth rates and STD infections if they do not actually succeed in lowering teen birth rates or STD infections?

There are many programs that are currently under the purview of the Bush administration that Obama intends to continue--like the Federal Government for one- but that does not mean he intends to pursue the same idiotic, ineffective and destructive priorities as Bush has. How hard is that to figure out? We could just as easily be talking about the EPA or NASA, or the Department of Education or whatever.

Almost the entire point here is to re-program the types of services supported leveraging the vast social service delivery system that already exists. That he will use it to make a positive difference in people's lives in ways that are wholly consistent with a liberal view of social justice is written into to his entire life story. Question: Mr Obama, why did you stay in that church for 20 years? Answer: Because this is community that teaches first and foremost that our faith commands us to help those who are in need and has backed up that belief with action to the great benefit of our community. (one imagines the same question never asked of McCain, why do admire Joel Osteen so much?).

The other point that is neglected here is that in changing the priorities of federal support for social services through faith based organizations, Obama intends to change the view that to be religious means to be socially conservative--a message that has apparently been internalized by way too many democrats. Instead he intends to change the frame entirely: faith requires you devote yourself to helping your fellow man and women, no one more so than those most in need. What he is trying to do here is exactly the opposite of pandering to the right. He is trying to turn the faith community into an instrument of social justice. To resurrect, if you will, the idea that liberal and progressive values flow naturally and directly from every and all faiths. Notice how that also feeds the frame of focusing on those things that unite us not divide us. (bush, prompted by Rove had the opposite intent)

Many on the right will resist because to them religion is primarily about fetuses, gays and contraception. I predict they will lose.