The federal government has been doing a lot to push abstinence-only education. Responsible professionals denounce such programs as ineffective and dangerous, but that doesn't matter because the programs conform to the administration's favored religious ideology. Now, the ACLU is launching a coordinated effort to oppose them.

According to their press release (via Feministing):

The American Civil Liberties Union today launched Not In My State, a nationwide action aimed at combating dangerous abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula. In a coordinated effort, ACLU affiliates across the country are sending letters to local officials calling for careful scrutiny of health and life-skills curricula. [...]

ACLU affiliates in 18 states called on local officials to keep unsafe abstinence-only-until-marriage programs out of the classroom. The letters encourage officials to select health and life-skills curricula that present medically accurate, age-appropriate, and unbiased information about sex and sexuality.

Even though abstinence-only education doesn’t work and doesn’t achieve the stated goals of preventing sexual activity or lowering rates of sexually-transmitted diseases, that doesn’t really matter. Why? Because they aren’t the primary goals of abstinence-only education, despite what we keep hearing from supporters. In reality, the primary goal is to protect the souls of the teens by keeping them from falling into sin.

Reference to the allegedly positive consequences of abstinence-only education is merely a ruse in order to attract the support of people who aren’t so extreme in their religious views and/or who aren’t as keen on designing school curricula according to standards of ideological and religious correctness.

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