Whether you are a parent of public-schooled, private-schooled, or homeschooled children, you should care about the kind of teaching your tax dollars are funding in the public schools. Programs that teach abstinence as a lifestyle are not perfect, but they are certainly better than the alternatives, and they make a real difference in kids' lives! Not surprisingly, these programs have their enemies, and those enemies are attempting to give federally-funded abstinence education a quiet death:

Abstinence education programs have been shown to effectively reduce the risks of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the incidence of s*xually transmitted diseases. Teaching teenagers that saving s*x until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness.

Title V is the $50 million mandatory appropriation created in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) bill. These funds are distributed on a formula basis to states, and this language is particularly important because it established the "A-H" criteria for abstinence education that governs all federal abstinence dollars.

Title V is scheduled to expire on June 30, 2007.

The wishes or convictions of parents seem to carry little weight in Congress:

Although a new Zogby poll shows that parents overwhelmingly support abstinence education, the House is mounting a forceful campaign to kill millions of dollars in Title V abstinence funding. Without a powerful grassroots campaign from people like you who support self-control over birth control for teens, Title V will expire for good. If this happens, states will not only lose their abstinence funding, they'll also lose the guidelines that govern all of the federal abstinence dollars.

Read more about it here and here, and call your Congressman.

Labels: Education, Political Action, Social Observation