by: 
GarrettMize
GarrettMizeMonday, October 18, 2010 at 12:36:00 PM EDT
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Garrett Mize is the Youth Advocacy Coordinator at the Texas Freedom Network and heads up the Texas Youth Leadership Council, the Texas portion of Advocates for Youth's Cultural Advocacy and Mobilization Initiative.
“It worked for me,” is all that our Governor could half-jokingly mutter about the failure of abstinence only sex education when grilled by the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune.
Rick Perry, widely known for his presidential aspirations, has been in office since George W. Bush left the post back in 2000 (because of his widely known presidential aspirations.) Perry is currently the longest serving governor in Texas history. Unfortunately, this also means his policies on sex-ed are also the longest serving in Texas.
The Texas Department of State Health Services recently drafted an application for $4.4 million in PREP funding in order to teach comprehensive sex-ed to young people in Texas public schools. This shows us that health professionals are ready for a change and they’re ready to teach comprehensive sex ed, but their hands are tied by an ideological executive branch. The Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner, Tom Suehs (a Perry appointee), decided along with the Governor’s office, that the state should not do this. Instead we’ve applied for (proven-ineffective) Title V funding yet again.
Keep in mind, that Texas leads the nation in the number of abstinence-only dollars spent and we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, as well as the highest rate of teens who have had two pregnancies before graduation (in the Dallas area in particular). Texas also has a high rate in the number of HIV infections among young people. The human toll of abstinence-only is very serious, and very high.
Over a 13 year period, teen births (through Medicaid, CHIP, hospital costs, etc) are estimated to have cost Texas taxpayers $15.1 billion...That's billion with a "b". That's a little over a billion dollars per year we spend to clean up the mess that abstinence-only causes when we could be preventing all of these problems with comprehensive sex-ed which is fiscally responsible and scientifically proven to work in delaying teenage sexual activity and risks. Not to mention, 80% of Texans support comprehensive sex-ed, including information about condoms. Rick Perry can call himself a fiscal conservative, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Essentially we are spending a little over a billion dollars each year trying to fix the problems caused by Rick Perry’s abstinence-only sex ed policy.
I’m not sure whether Perry actually believes in abstinence-only or not. His smug reply in the video indicates that he may be lying and is simply trying to evade a tough question about his record. What's odd is that he doesn't even seem to know how to talk about this issue. He seems to be pretty ignorant of the facts, the buzz words or even a coherent conservative argument. Maybe he’s “playing politics” and simply appealing to his base – who knows. Either way, he is playing politics with the children of Texas. Perhaps it's time for Texans to start abstaining from Perry's sex ed policies.
We can call it "politics" all we want -- but it's costly, dangerous politics.
Comments
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Wow. Thanks for posting this, Garrett. He really deserves to be laughed at when he is.
# Posted By AFY_Abby
| 10/18/10 04:50 PM
| Reply
This is an amazing article! thank you!
# Posted By nakedscissors
| 10/25/10 04:50 PM
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