Abstinence Programs Attacked

Special Report - September 17, 2008
Two comprehensive sex education (CSE) advocates claim that some abstinence programs are unconstitutional because they promote “gender stereotypes” by teaching students that men and women have innate differences. An issue brief entitled “Lesson One: Your Gender is Your Destiny—The Constitutionality of Teaching Sex Stereotypes in Abstinence-Only Programs,” was distributed by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and written by Bonnie Scott Jones and Michelle Movahed of the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights. The brief argues that some abstinence education programs “perpetuate and reinforce gender stereotypes” by teaching “boys and girls that their abilities, natures, capacities and potential are defined and limited by gender.” The authors focus their attack on two popular abstinence programs: “Choosing the Best,” and “WAIT (Why Am I Tempted) Training.” The authors argue that both programs:

• “present boys and girls as fundamentally different... The series characterize particular emotional characteristics and basic needs as inherently, and exclusively, masculine or feminine.”
  
• “teach that girls and boys relate to others in different, gender-stereotypical, ways,” such a girls being more sensitive and relationship-oriented and boys generally being more objective and rationale, and
  
• teach that sex is generally more of an emotional need for girls and a physical need for boys (i.e., one of the programs teaches that men “may use love to get sex” and girls “may use sex to get love.”)
  
  

The study contends that “the teaching of sex stereotypes as facts by public school abstinence programs violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and is vulnerable to court challenge.” Although they note that the U.S. Supreme Court “has not yet explicitly addressed the constitutionality of government-sponsored teaching of gender stereotypes, such teachings deny equal protection to both boys and girls under the Court’s sex discrimination jurisprudence.” They urge educators and lawmakers to continue efforts to “cease funding” of abstinence-only programs “in favor of nondiscriminatory comprehensive sex education programs.” They also urge the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit sex education grant recipients from including programs or curricula that teach “sex stereotypes.”

“Men and women are born with distinct differences, and these differences dictate how men and women relate to each other and to the world in unique but important ways,” said Matt Lytle, director of research for the North Carolina Family Policy Council. “CSE advocates want to blur the lines between the genders, so that gender becomes interchangeable, which opens the door to a host of sexual behaviors and lifestyles that put children at risk, including homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism.”

Lytle continued, “In contrast, authentic abstinence education does not ignore or deny the well-documented differences between men and women but seeks to help students understand these differences, and how they impact our relationship in order to show why sex works best inside marriage.”

Copyright © 2008. North Carolina Family Policy Council. All rights reserved.