@busdriver11:
I am quite the same person. The fact is that sex ed and birth control programs work and it is the illogical beliefs of the religious right that keep them from being applied. One of my biggest problems with the Catholic Church and its ‘teachings’ on birth control and sexuality (besides the fact that they are not scriptural in many cases), is that they don’t apply logic to their own teaching, or much compassion I might add. They have decided, for example, that condoms are an evil, violate teachings, yet condoms can for example help slow done the rate of HIV transmission, so what is worse, violating a teaching that is non scriptural, or the very real problem of HIV and AIDS, especially in a third world country.
There is a real example of this. In Uganda, the AIDS infection rates at one point were sky high and estimates were that infection rates were going to get to 50% of the adult population. A program was started by the government, a masssive education campaign on AIDS that included distribution of condoms, and it worked, the new HIV infection rate plummeted. A new government came into power, and the president and his wife were ardent Catholics, and at the urging of the church there, they stopped the condom distribution program, shut down the government information campaigns and sexual education campaigns, and replaced it with ‘abstinence only’ in effect, no sex before marriage, waving the bible, you name it…and the aids infections rates soared once again.
@busdriver11, my problem with your statements and some of the others is that it doesn’t meet my test for veracity, because it de facto blames for example the teenage unwed mother issue on government programs that failed, or ideology that says “you aren’t to blame”, and that fails the BS test. The unwed birthrate among for example, african americans, was soaring long before the government even acknowledged the problem, with the mass migration of blacks to the northern cities, especially post WWII, the ills we are talking about happened during the supposedly ‘golden’ era. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about the issue in the late 1950’s, and it was a trend already at a disturbing level…and this was long before government programs. Your posts and others make it seem like the problem was caused by government programs, ‘liberal’ mentalities and so forth (and here I’ll be careful, I am talking of posts in general on here, some of these things were not yourself).
For example, as others have pointed out, programs that support sex ed and access to birth control do seem to be working, the pregnancy rate for example for young black women has dropped. Likewise, while poverty rates are nothing to be proud of, if you look at specifics compared to let’s say 50 years ago, poverty rates have fallen. It is a problem that the poverty rate of let’s sat blacks is twice that of whites, and that ration hasn’t changed, but the rate of poverty among all groups has fallen in the last 50 years, and some of that can be traced to government programs.
It is the same problem I have with the tea party and similar types when they talk about how the government does nothing right, how the government is nothing but failed programs, how ‘private business’ handles things better, it is more efficient, etc, and that is absolutely false, the way that saying government can solve everything is false. Farmers are famous for complaining about ‘the government’, yet the government, through things like hybrid seed programs, and other research, made their lives a lot easier and also increased their yields. Farms got electric power and these days are tied to the internet because of government programs and subsidies, likewise the roads the federal government built in the 1930’s and later helped them be less isolated, to get their stuff to market easier and so forth. Most of the major technology we are so proud of and use today came about directly or indirectly from uncle sam, private businesses hate doing research, beancounters say it is a ‘waste of money’ if it has no immediate ROI, so much of that was funded by Uncle Sam. Does the government foul up? Does it throw good money after bad? Is it politics based, is there pork and stupid spending, yes (interesting that many of those who scream about ‘inneficient government’ and want to gut spending on research, want to inflate the defense budget, which has more waste then a barn full of cows and often is more about pork and jobs than effective defense)
My problem with things like bans on same sex marriage are all about logical tests and my irritation with the religious right is the same as with their objections to evolution and science, they are welcome to their beliefs, but their beliefs are irrational, they have no rational cause, no rational basis, yet they want to make policy decisions for everyone else based on those beliefs. Schools are there to teach kids to think, it isn’t there to enhance ‘long held beliefs’; in the public sphere, the law isn’t about belief, it is about the functioning of civil society, and religious beliefs on their own don’t further that, believing that same sex couples are ‘not allowed by God’ is neither logical nor furthers society’s interests, so should not be involved in decisions like same sex marriage. If sex education and access to birth control cuts down STD rates and unwanted pregnancies and has been shown to do so, then what any church believes is irrelevant. If Abstinence only actually showed it worked, it should be given a shot, but abstinence only sex ed under any kind of logical test fails and turns out to be belief driven rather than factual.
And yeah, I have the same problem with what I call the granola head liberal branch of things, where the answer is spending more on programs that haven’t worked, hoping they will work or where ideas like self reliance or personal responsibility are automatically dirty words (on the other hand, the ‘rugged individualists’ who tell me how ‘they’ should pull them up by their bootstraps, the way they themselves did, is also crap most of the time, too, for a lot of reasons).
