Last week, Capitol Hill was deluged with false talking points from the abstinence-only crowd, as they held their annual “Abstinence on the Hill” Lobby Day. While I’ve gone over several of these falsehoods (“0%” of comprehensive sex education programs talk about abstinence, “0%” of unintended pregnancies would have been prevented with contraceptive access), one that was repeatedly mentioned and deserves some attention is their claim that comprehensive sex education receives more money than abstinence-only education. Several referred to the “fact” that it receives “double” the funding, or “ten times” the funding. All they wanted was “parity” in funding between the two programs.

Such statements are, of course, completely false. The fact of the matter is, there is no dedicated federal funding stream for comprehensive sex ed programs. None.

This is an old falsehood used by the abstinence-only movement, claiming that all Title X funding is actually for “comprehensive sex education”. In reality, Title X funding goes towards health services for low income women and adolescents. They provide not only contraceptive methods, but Pap smears, breast exams, screening and treatment for STIs, and screening for hypertension, diabetes, and anemia. For a large number of these young women, this serves as their primary health care and will be the only doctor’s visit that they have during the year.

But this hasn’t stopped them from trying to muddy the issue with this blatant falsehood. The strategy is the same wherever you look in their circles: use “comprehensive sex ed” interchangeably with “contraceptive programs” or “contraception education” until they become the same thing. The Abstinence Clearinghouse claims that “contraceptive education” receives 12 times the funding of abstinence-only programs, while the Heritage Foundation uses this same figure, directly using the term “comprehensive sex ed programs”.

Keith Deltano, a “comedian/abstinence educator” in Florida, also tries to push this falsehood on his website. On a graph that he recently sent out in an email blast labeled “are you smarter than a 6th grader”, he tries to claim that funding for contraception education and programs corresponds with the rise in teen births, and that they only began to decline once abstinence-only programs started to receive funding.

While it’s somewhat doubtful that a 6th grader would concoct such a blatantly dishonest piece of propaganda such as this, it’s quite possible that a sixth grader could read about Title X programs and realize this is in no way constitutes teaching comprehensive sex education to youth.

First off, the red line of course has nothing to do with comprehensive sex education, as this was a steady “0” over this time frame. Secondly, even if it was, the cuts to Title X funding in the Reagan/Bush era and late in Bush Jr.’s term show a corresponding increase in the teen birth rate. And finally, notice the convenient absence of data at the end of the graph regarding the teen birth rate. With abstinence-only funding reaching record levels in 2006 and 2007, the 14-year trend of decreasing teen birth rates reverses (with this week’s CDC report showing it going up for the second year in a row, by 1.4%).

But this kind of misinformation from Keith Deltano shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, he makes his living being paid by these abstinence-only groups to scream at young people about how condoms “don’t work” and demonstrates this by holding cinder blocks over the genitals of students lying down in front of him. Seriously, check it out. He’s even scarier (and sweatier) than Derek the Abstinence Clown.

With this week’s introduction of the REAL Act by Sen. Lautenberg and Rep. Lee, we can be sure to see these misinformation tactics come out of the woodwork, yet again. The REAL Act would finally provide a direct funding stream for comprehensive sex education. But what will we hear from the abstinence-only lobby? “They already get 12 times the funding that we do! You just want to give them more?”

Let’s be prepared for this false talking point in the coming weeks. You can beat them to the punch by letting your Congressperson know the real truth: it’s time to finally start funding real, science-based comprehensive sex education that actually gets results.