This Is How We Are Spending Billions On The Sexual Mis-Education Of America’s Youth [View all]

[Panich52]

ThinkProgress

In early February, Kelly Wortham’s sixth-grade son brought home a letter from Jarrett Middle School in Springfield, Missouri. The letter, from the Missouri State University School of Social Work, informed Wortham and other parents at Jarrett that their children were “being invited to take part in an abstinence-based education program designed to reduce teen pregnancy in southwest Missouri.”

The program, the letter assured, “is designed to teach teens about the benefits of choosing abstinence and how to better communicate with parents/guardians, families, and peers.” The course would use “Choosing the Best,” a self-described “abstinence-focused” curriculum published by a Georgia-based company of the same name. ...

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A few days later, Wortham received an email from a Jarrett Middle School employee encouraging her to “preview information about the curriculum” on its website, www.choosingthebest.com. Wortham and her husband took a look. “It gave us both almost a negative visceral response,” she recalled. “We were looking at the [curriculum for older students], where they help you find your soulmate. It’s just stuff that really seemed to use the language of shaming and applying a Christian morality on something that from our perspective should really be about human sexuality and science. It made us very nervous.”

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At first glance, Choosing the Best’s website looked legitimate. It explicitly called its curriculum “research-based,” and included links to “medical accuracy” and “results” pages. The site’s FAQs listed two medical organizations — The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) and the Medical Institute for Sexual Health — that endorsed the abstinence-centered model. But the Worthams soon uncovered research about both groups that they found troubling. In a subsequent interview with the Springfield News-Leader, Kelly called the curriculum “fear-based” and assserted that “the medical groups that sponsor it are hate groups.”

The American College of Pediatricians seemed to have a particularly egregious track record. The organization produces the “Facts About Youth” website, which outlines the “health risks of the homosexual lifestyle” and advocates for “change therapy … for patients seeking to change unwanted homosexuality and develop their heterosexual potential.”

In 2010, the director of the National Institutes of Health condemned the ACP for distorting “scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality. The American College of Pediatricians pulled language out of context from a book I wrote in 2006 to support an ideology that can cause unnecessary anguish and encourage prejudice.” And, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACP “often serves as a supposedly scientific source for groups pushing utter falsehoods about LGBT people.”

More (numerous links in article)
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/07/01/3671946/the-sexual-miseducation-of-americas-youth/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elq=f25e3f477c7a4c4b8b5371c2aafe441a&elqCampaignId=3277&elqaid=26199&elqat=1&elqTrackId=1d8ce69361d741699798b862c632a67d&elqTrack=true