#abstinence only

Despite their religious nature, abstinence-only programs cost taxpayers $1.5 billion between 1996 and 2010 before dropping to $250 million per year (thanks, Obama). At one point, those virginity pledge cards were treated like scientific evidence, with government officials paid to tally them for study.

But the purity movement isn’t all witty underpants and daughters dancing on their fathers’ shoes. The same tenets that underpin purity culture—namely, rigid beliefs about gender and sexuality—are also the features that sustain rape culture. And the negative outcomes are as multifaceted as my purity ring: sexual shame, self-loathing, fear-based morality, and marked ignorance about sexual concepts.

One researcher describes the cost of purity culture as deep sexual shame and self-loathing so intense that she compares it to survivors of childhood sexual assault. An alumnus of a radicalized Christian college reports that the majority of women who graduate from the school cannot label their own anatomies or explain the basics of sex. For young adults kept woefully ignorant by abstinence initiatives, more advanced topics like consent and coercion are even more obscured.

In assessing the efficacy of purity vows, the findings are also grim. Researchers using those tallied pledge cards report no differences between virginity pledgers and control adolescents in terms of sexual behaviors. It turns out true love doesn’t wait—and it also doesn’t use condoms. Adolescents who sign virginity pledges are much less likely to use birth control or condoms and are at increased risk for both pregnancy and STIs.

One team of researchers, tasked with evaluating the arc of abstinence-only initiatives, decries abstinence programs as a threat to adolescents’ fundamental rights. They also note that the programs “reinforce gender stereotypes about female passivity and male aggressiveness,” highlighting a distinct similarity between purity culture and rape culture.

The purity movement drives this message home, directly holding girls and women responsible for managing the sexual impulses of the boys and men around them. Iconic purity-culture resources like I Kissed Dating Goodbye admonish young women to monitor their dress, speech, and behavior to stop men from stumbling into sexual sin. The best way to do this? Another guide, Lady In Waiting, exhorts adolescent girls to view themselves as sleeping princesses: carefully preserved, inert, and waiting for husbands.

Evangelical students are entering radicalized colleges ignorant of basic sexual concepts with rigid and damaging beliefs about gender, which include believing men are incapable of self-control and women must be both submissive and vigilant.  

At the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year, Florida’s Santa Rosa County school district signed a contract with an outside organization whom it had hired to run the district’s sex education for the next half decade.

This would not have been notable save for one salient fact. The group, the Pregnancy Resource Center, is a religious organization and the school district is a public one.

Of course, Santa Rosa County is no anomaly. Scores of public school students across the country are currently receiving sex “education” from a range of Christian-affiliated abstinence-only programs with names like the Chastity Project, the Silver Ring Thing, Sex Respect, and True Love Waits.

But these are not the only groups offering abstinence-only education. Some programs are run by the educational arms of fake clinics, commonly called “crisis pregnancy centers.” These often operate under different names than their parent organization, which can make the connection to an anti-choice, religiously affiliated pregnancy center far less transparent.

Beyond the fact that such a marriage between religious organizations and public schools is a murky issue when it comes to the law, not every parent agrees with these debunked and ineffective education programs. In a number of places, recently in St. Louis, Missouri, we have seen parents demand a clear separation of church and state.

These calls are important to consider, not only when looking at these specific groups, but also when looking at abstinence education as a whole. This is because, at its core, the abstinence-only movement is really a message of conservative Christian values.

Many groups claim that while they might be religiously affiliated, their programs for public schools are not. A pregnancy center in Ohio, which offers a program called Sexual Health and Purity Education,explains on its website, “Abstinence presentations made to public schools do not contain any references to religion. Abstinence presentations to church youth groups and Christian clubs do discuss God’s plan for sexuality and marriage.”

However, the entire concept of “purity” is based on an evangelical Christian ideology, a religious faith claimed by a quarter of the U.S. population, but by no means the voice of all Americans. Further, the American Civil Liberties Union explains that while under the federal Constitution and state law, schools may teach sexual abstinence, it “may not be taught as religious tenets.”

I appeared on a FB Live show and I liked her way more before... #sextalk #parenting #virgins

I wasn’t even going to give Dani Johnson another second of my time or energy after I appeared on her Facebook Live/ Radio show the other day, but God has put it on my heart to get my frustration off my chest and maybe help bless her heart along the way (in the real sense, not the Southern sense).

I saw a Facebook post on the Dani Johnson page the other day. I’ve been following her for a few…

Valerie Huber’s Dangerous Lesson Plan (via Huffington Post)

I’m not even talking about birth control and shit like that, because of course they’re not going to teach that.

It doesn’t teach you in-depth about how the reproductive system works beyond the basics of the organs (or at least my school system didn’t). I got more out of physiology than health class (and that still wasn’t a whole lot). I’m not going to go on some whorish fornication rampage because I know the specifics of when and how ovulation occurs.

And it doesn’t teach you much about communication, which even my inexperienced ass knows is important. I’m talking communication about boundaries, what you’re comfortable with, how to initiate The Sex Conversation, stuff like that.

And whether you wait until marriage or not, these things are really big deals. You need to have a working knowledge of how your own reproductive system works. You need to be able to tell your partner “this is what I’m comfortable with and this is what I’m not comfortable with.”