Our tax dollars pay for this specious nonsense?

From Thursday’s WashPost, a report on the dollars being poured into the fundies abstinence-only sex miseducation program. The Post report is here. Henry Waxman’s Congressional Committee Report is here in PDF form.

From the Post: “Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.”

“Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.”

Our Dear Leader and his toadies will spend $170 million on this sort of specious garbage in fiscal 2005. Here’s more from the Post:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."
• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

All of those “facts” are wrong, yet your tax dollars are funding programs to teach the material to gullible children. How about “… women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile.”

The PDF report states that 11 of the 13 curricula studied contain: “major errors and distortions of public health information.” My personal favorite excerpts from the PDF report are first, on the report’s page 15: “One curriculum that describes fetuses as “babies” describes the blastocyst, technically a ball of 107 to 256 cells at the beginning of uterine implantation, as “snuggling” into the uterus.” And on page 20: “It [the report] similarly implies that 50% of homosexual teens have HIV.” Give me a break!

Your tax dollars are at work while the Church-State wall is under serious attack.