Last week new polling came out on Millennials and their thoughts on a variety of “social issues.” After digging through the top line research on abortion (you can read some of my thoughts here), you’ll find buried in the middle of the report data on Millennial’s views of comprehensive sex education.

“Nearly 8-in-10 (78%) Americans favor comprehensive sex education in public schools. Among generational groups, support for comprehensive sex education is strongest among Millennials (88%).”

I’m shocked.

I mean, seriously. How many studies need to be done to show that Americans support comprehensive sex education? We have years and years of data from every political party affiliation, religious group…heck this recent data shows even White Evangelicals support comprehensive sex education. THE TEA PARTY EVEN SUPPORTS COMPREHENSIVE SEX EDUCATION (less of a majority at 54%...but who’d a thunk?).

Despite this and other data, you still see attack after attack on comprehensive sex education and the promotion of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs by what this and other data shows must be the faaaaaaaar right.

For example, House Republicans are likely to bring to the floor HR 1215, unless of course they listen to the public and pull back from their extreme positioning. HR 1215 is a bill that would make the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) discretionary-which means Congress would have to appropriate PREP money each year (and it would get caught up in budget fights-but let’s be honest, they really just want to defund the whole dang thing). Now what exactly is wrong with PREP? Well, it’s a $75 million/year for five years mandatory state grant program to teach young people about abstinence, contraception and other adulthood preparation subjects like healthy relationships. Yep. That’s it. And pretty appropriate given that we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the developed world, no?

In the first year of PREP, 43 states opted-in to receiving this funding, including Bible Belt states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma and Louisiana who have some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the entire country. These are also states where we see the HIV epidemic growing. More states applied for PREP than the failed abstinence-only-until-marriage funding that like PREP, was funded out of the Affordable Care Act. If the states, including some of the most conservative, are getting it right, why isn’t Congress?

Reflecting back to the start of this Congress, there were heated debates over the fiscal year 2011 budget. In HR 1, or the House Republican’s initial proposal that was passed back in February, they completely defunded the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, a new program to fund evidence-based sex education, most of which include information about both abstinence and contraception. Luckily, the Senate was having none of that.

And just a few weeks ago, 40 Members of Congress released a sign-on letter asking to bring back funding for failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs we saw flourish under the Bush administration. Referring to this program as a “dedicated abstinence education funding stream” they really are speaking about CBAE or Community-Based Abstinence Education that are not just programs that include information about abstinence (that would be the more comprehensive programs I’ve already referred to), but programs that preach abstinence in the context of abstinence-only-until-marriage i.e. no information for young people who decide to have sex (46% of high school students in 2009).

We’ve already spent over $1.5 billion on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that congressionally-mandated studies show don’t work, but that apparently doesn’t mean anything, even in these fiscal times.

So really now. When exactly are policymakers going to get on board? This is an EASY issue for the large majority of Americans and even more so for Millennials. If HR 1215 comes to the floor, do you think 54% of the Tea Party candidates will vote no and support PREP? Especially if their state opted-in to that funding? Or maybe the budget hawks would speak up and stop spending money on failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs? They do keep talking about this deficit afterall…

A girl can dream…