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That's been known for years.
Let's discuss it again.
Resolved: that the empirical evidence is complete bull . First affirmative constructive is... ah, xrayzebra, please take the podium.
Anyone horribly surprised?
Yahoo NewsWASHINGTON - Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not, according to a long-awaited study mandated by Congress.
Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes, and they first had sex at about the same age as their control group counterparts — 14 years and nine months, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.
The federal government now spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education. Critics have repeatedly said they don't believe the programs are working, and the study will give them reinforcement.
However, Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study. They said the four programs reviewed — among several hundred across the nation — were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation's welfare laws in 1996.
That's been known for years.
Let's discuss it again.
Resolved: that the empirical evidence is complete bull . First affirmative constructive is... ah, xrayzebra, please take the podium.
The survey only drew from the pool of students in public schools (makes sense considering that the study attempts to qualify the success rate for these federal programs).... I'm pretty sure the results would be different if the entire student pool had been adequately represented.... in particular the home-schooled crowd.
Besides, abstinence is tied to a spiritual conviction that one is obeying GOD's will. This mindset cannot be propagated, instilled or nurtured with secular programs that try to achieve the same goal.
Last edited by Phenomanul; 04-13-2007 at 04:39 PM.
Resolved: that public school students are fundamentally lacking in moral fibre, and MOREOVER that not getting any is joyous to the soul.
"Besides abstinence is tied to a spiritual conviction that one is obeying GOD's will."
off, Bible-thumper.
Sexual abstinence can be taught for reasons without introducing God. Avoiding pregnancy and STD are the most immediately scary reasons, much more immediate than God's . As with criminals, dissuasion doesn't work for horny, curious kids.
The Repugs also mixed sexual abstinence into their African anti-AIDs campaign, preferring that non-abstaining Africans die of AIDS rather than be encouraged to use condoms in their inevitable sex.
Ideology sucks, Repug/neo- ideology murders.
=======
Just today:
"CDC Changes Recommendations For Gonorrhea Treatment Due To Drug Resistance
Science Daily — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) no longer recommends antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones (ciprofloxacin, ofloxacin, and levofloxacin) as a treatment for gonorrhea in the United States. This limits the options available to treat gonorrhea, one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States.
The recommendation was prompted by new data released today in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) showing that fluoroquinolone-resistant gonorrhea is now widespread in the United States among heterosexuals and men who have sex with men (MSM). The data showed the proportion of drug-resistant cases among heterosexuals rising above the recognized threshold of 5 percent for changing treatment recommendations. CDC had recommended fluoroquinolones no longer be used to treat gonorrhea in MSM when this threshold was crossed in earlier years. ....."
there should be a balanced approach to sex ed. abstinence has its rightful place, but is ineffective if not paired with a program that teaches about proper contraceptive use.
plus, in numerous surveys across the country... this kind of dual edged approach is what the majority of parents want
Reading comprehension 101 my extremely bitter 'ol pal..... here, I'll re-iterate the clause you completely ignored.
"This mindset cannot be propagated, instilled or nurtured with secular programs that try to achieve the same goal."
One can teach abstinence all they want and try to 'scare' teens with STD's and pregnancy. But setting a 'rule' or a 'prohibition' is not as effective as instilling a personal conviction - that inner desire to remain abstinent for a grander purpose and not just to avoid getting sick or having to bring an 'unwanted' baby into the world. Abstinence is a gift for one's future spouse.
So while you are correct in noting that GOD doesn't necessarily have to be part of that conviction, I truly believe that excluding Him from the picture only serves to increase the weight of that 'burden' on a person.
Last edited by Phenomanul; 04-13-2007 at 05:29 PM.
However, you completely missed my larger point:
That one can't take the survey's results and draw the general conclusion that abstinence programs fail, or that abstinence programs aren't effective.
From the data collected, one can only draw the conclusion that federal abstinence programs in our schools fail to curb premarital sex. That conclusion alone.
There is a big difference.
Last edited by Phenomanul; 04-13-2007 at 06:06 PM.
The government should immediately implement, in every public school system, comprehensive programs basing all elementary, secondary, and collegiate education upon Christian tenets. Not tomorrow. Now.
Please FWD.... you know that's not what I meant. A moral base cannot be instilled in school. That is one of the chief reasons why the home exists. This responsibility falls squarely on the parents - not the schools. Granted, there is an inherent problem when we get to the point where kids are raising kids.... oh wait.
I'm simply stating why such federal programs are doomed to fail.
Last edited by Phenomanul; 04-13-2007 at 06:07 PM.
agreed. but even with the role of religion at home, i think we have a responsibility to teach safe sex practices for those that are bound to do it anyway
"upon Christian tenets"
Be more specific. How are these tenets different from Hindu, Moslim, Jewish, Buddhist tenets about extra-marital sex?
Do they have to be Christian tenets?
Is this part of the vast radical "Christian" conspiracy to force "Christ", to the exclusion of all other religions, into secular areas like government and public schools?
You go out of your way to tie everything in this forum to your god hegamboa. As if someone would never practice abstinence for a non-god reason.
Phenomanul, you can believe in abstinence without being a Christian. It is possible.
They don't let Christianity into public schools and government areas either boutons. They try to exclude it so much.
"They don't let Christianity into public schools"
The "politico-Christian" conspiracy is to overcome that secularism, forcing God into Caesar's domain, exactly UNlike the NT says. Un-Christian, and un-Cons uional, but the "Christians" don't give a FF.
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” Matt 22:21
Really? The last time I checked intelligent design (a Christian principle) is banned from public school education, while evolution (a secular principle), is the only theory taught. So who is forcing their beliefs on who?
Here's the Repugs stuffing mediocritie from junk "Christian universities" into government.
For God's Sake
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 13 April 2007
In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement - the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right - suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. "Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure," he wrote, "and they must begin to infiltrate the existing ins utional order."
Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.
Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university's law school. She's the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.
The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda - which is very different from simply being people of faith - is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.
But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.
Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was the dean of Regent's government school, was the federal government's chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job with Mitc Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham.) And it's clear that unqualified people were hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.
For example, The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate who was interviewed by the Justice Department's civil rights division. Asked what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed with, he named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When he was hired, it was his only job offer.
Or consider George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told a Web site designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of "intelligent design by a creator." He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas A&M.
One measure of just how many Bushies were appointed to promote a religious agenda is how often a Christian right connection surfaces when we learn about a Bush administration scandal.
There's Ms. Goodling, of course. But did you know that Rachel Paulose, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota - three of whose deputies recently stepped down, reportedly in protest over her management style - is, according to a local news report, in the habit of quoting Bible verses in the office?
Or there's the case of Claude Allen, the presidential aide and former deputy secretary of health and human services, who stepped down after being investigated for petty theft. Most press reports, though they mentioned Mr. Allen's faith, failed to convey the fact that he built his career as a man of the hard-line Christian right.
And there's another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism of these people.
You see, Regent isn't a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It's run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God's punishment for America's sins.
Two days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Robertson held a conversation with Jerry Falwell on Mr. Robertson's TV show "The 700 Club." Mr. Falwell laid blame for the attack at the feet of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," not to mention the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way. "Well, I totally concur," said Mr. Robertson.
The Bush administration's implosion clearly represents a setback for the Christian right's strategy of infiltration. But it would be wildly premature to declare the danger over. This is a movement that has shown great resilience over the years. It will surely find new champions.
Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent's Executive Leadership Series.
My hero. [/swoon]
More "Christian" from bogus "ministers in Christ"
Chaplains' Complaints Of Bias Rise At NIH
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 14, 2007; A01
The spiritual ministry department of the National Ins utes of Health, which serves patients being treated in the nation's premier research hospital, is in disarray and battling a lawsuit and discrimination complaints that allege bias against Jewish and Catholic chaplains.
In February, a federal panel ordered the hospital to reinstate a Catholic priest who was wrongfully fired in 2004. In January, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had found that he was the target of "discriminatory and retaliatory animus." Three other former chaplains have said that they also were wrongfully terminated.
They have accused O. Ray Fitzgerald, a Methodist minister and the former head of the spiritual ministry department, of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. They say that NIH retaliated against them when they spoke up and invented reasons for terminating them.
Fitzgerald was demoted from the chief chaplain's post two weeks ago after the EEOC, which cited the "animus," and the Merit Systems Protection Board ordered the rehiring of and back pay for the priest, the Rev. Henry Heffernan.
NIH officials "endorsed intolerance, and they reinforced intolerance with intolerance," said Rabbi Reeve Brenner, who testified last year in support of the priest and was fired as a hospital chaplain in February. He has filed a complaint with the Merit Board, an agency that hears federal personnel disputes, saying that he was removed by NIH as retribution for his testimony.
Another ousted chaplain, Greek Orthodox lay minister Edar Rogler, is suing the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH's parent agency, saying that she also was removed for testifying in support of Heffernan. In her lawsuit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Maryland, and in her testimony in Heffernan's case, she says NIH officials hatched a plan, "Operation Clean Sweep," to purge staff members who cooperated in the priest's complaint.
Rogler alleges that Fitzgerald made frequent anti-Semitic comments about Brenner. In her lawsuit, she says that Fitzgerald referred to Brenner as "the butthead Jew" and "the crass Jew."
"He would not refer to the rabbi ever by his name," Rogler said in an interview. "It was always 'that Jew, that Jew.' " She was fired from her part-time chaplain's job in 2005 after she said she informed NIH officials that she planned to testify before the EEOC on behalf of Heffernan. The EEOC called her testimony more credible than Fitzgerald's.
NIH spokesman Don Ralbovsky confirmed that the clinical center has replaced Fitzgerald as chief chaplain. Fitzgerald's boss -- Walter Jones, deputy director of diversity management at NIH -- is running the department temporarily, Ralbovsky said. Fitzgerald continues to work as an NIH chaplain.
Ralbovsky would not comment on the allegations. Fitzgerald did not return calls to his office and his home.
But in letters to Rogler and in filings with the EEOC, NIH officials say that they fired Rogler for poor performance and that she didn't come forward with her complaints about Fitzgerald until after she was terminated.
The hospital's chief operating officer, Maureen Gormley, said in a letter to Brenner that he was being terminated for several infractions, including commingling his job as a federal employee with outside activities and being absent without leave for a day.
The former chaplains say that tensions have simmered in the department for years under Fitzgerald. The hospital, a clinical research center, employs about a half-dozen chaplains of various faiths, but in recent years turnover has been unusually high. At least seven have been ousted or have left voluntarily because they were unhappy with Fitzgerald's management style, said several former members of the department.
The Rev. Gary Johnston, who worked there for 18 years before leaving in 2002 to become a Protestant military chaplain, said in an interview that Fitzgerald told him he didn't want rabbis and Catholic priests in the department.
"I considered him to be very anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic," Johnston said.
The chaplains tend to the spiritual needs of patients in the two adjacent buildings on the Bethesda campus which make up the hospital -- the 14-story Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center and the Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center.
Patients from all over the world are treated as part of clinical studies related to a variety of issues, including weight loss, allergies, substance abuse, heart disease and cancer. The center has about 7,000 inpatient admissions and 100,000 outpatient visits each year.
In testimony and in an interview, Heffernan, who joined the department in 1994, said he protested that the hospital's Catholic patients were being unfairly short-changed because Fitzgerald demanded that Heffernan minister to non-Catholic patients.
He said this left him with not enough time to minister to all of his Catholic patients. Heffernan also was concerned with what he called Fitzgerald's "generic chaplaincy" approach, because non-Catholic chaplains are unable to perform the Catholic sacraments, such as hearing confessions and performing last rites.
Fitzgerald, the EEOC said, retaliated by suspending Heffernan for five days in early 2004 for coming in on his days off, despite Fitzgerald's order not to. Heffernan held Mass for a priest who fell ill. Fitzgerald also demanded that Heffernan take entry-level training in hospital chaplaincy, despite his 40 years of experience in the field and the fact that other chaplains were not required to do so.
In July 2004, Heffernan was fired. At Heffernan's EEOC hearing last year, Brenner and Rogler testified that they had heard Fitzgerald express anti-Catholic sentiments against the priest. Rogler testified that Fitzgerald told her that Catholic priests are pedophiles.
"They singled out Father Heffernan . . . so they could get him out of there," Brenner said. "That was the most offensive thing -- this 75-year-old man who had more wisdom and integrity in his fingertips than his superiors had in all their lives."
In February, the Merit Board ordered Heffernan reinstated. In a separate ruling, the EEOC ordered NIH to accommodate the priest's desire to see only Catholics, except in emergencies.
The EEOC said that Fitzgerald's testimony was evasive and that statements by Rogler and Brenner at the hearing provided "corroborating testimony" to show that Fitzgerald was biased against Roman Catholics.
Rogler said Jones and Gormley fired her after she informed Jones that she would testify on behalf of Heffernan.
In a letter terminating Brenner, Gormley acknowledged that Brenner had an acceptable job performance record during his five years at NIH. But, among other complaints, she accused him of mixing private and clinical work by forming a temple to which he improperly transported Jewish patients for services.
But Brenner, who has appealed his removal to the Merit Board, said that NIH officials never objected to his activities until he testified at Heffernan's hearing.
Heffernan, Rogler and Brenner have won praise from patients.
Howie Appel, whose wife, Marla, has kidney cancer, said that Brenner has visited them twice during Marla's stays and that Brenner performed Friday night religious services in their room.
"He was our only connection to our religion up here," said Appel, who lives with his wife in Lake Mary, Fla. "I admire the guy, and I'm so glad we met him."
Benjamin Rubin, an NIH doctor and a rabbi who occasionally filled in for Brenner, said he was informed that his physician's contract would not be renewed last month.
Rubin said he had complained about the NIH hospital's treatment of observant Jewish patients. Among other problems, he said, an NIH official brushed off his concerns about the lack of worship facilities for Jews on NIH's campus by saying that they could be transported to services off campus. But Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath because they believe it violates Torah prohibitions against Sabbath work.
Heffernan returned to work in late March and has since been working 12-hour days to catch up. The chaplains' office is struggling, he said.
"It was a sad situation then," he said, "and it's a sad situation now."
Another thread hijack I see.
Anyways, way to miss the entire issue. Regardless of what convictions abstinence is tied to, it takes a personal burning desire to overcome peer pressure and a burning desire. Kids aren't dumb, they know very well the implications of what they are doing, but they don't have time to look at things logically when this opporunity to either give in or abstain comes up. 99% of them will act on their impulsive desire.
The only people that will seriously take the road of abstinence are the devout and the non-impulsive reasoners. Awareness is only half of the solution, the other half remains in the person themselves.
boutons, you sure don't act very liberal for a bush basher. You act just like the people that you condemn. Replace your subjects with the liberal alternative and no one would think you are anything other than a crazy conservative. I know you just like to play devil's advocate.
Yes, how dare you critcize CBF's unchosen abstinence!
Abstinence classes only fail because we haven't been praying hard enough.
eh, CBF's girl is soooo ridicously hot absinence is not an option.
Only the federal government can spend a couple hundred
million dollars on teaching morals.
Don't you have to wonder sometimes where the parents are in
all of this. And wouldn't it be nice if the schools would just
teach a "little" bit of morals and discipline and have the ability
to fire some of the dead weight in schools.
I see all the critics of christian teachings on this forum, but
have any of these critics read the 10 commandments lately.
None of them are offensive to anyone and all of the are
as important today as the day they were handed down.
And should pertain to all religions. And maybe just plain
old good rules to live by.
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