The Nation reports that the discredited abstinence education movement that flourished under the Bush administration is trying to rebrand itself now that federal dollars (and attention) aren't so easy to come by. Valerie Huber, who used to oversee Ohio's programs, makes an appearance — she's now executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association:
At an April 29 Capitol Hill briefing, Huber told the room that abstinence-only education is "not a 'just say no' message." "This is not abstinence only, this is a holistic message that prepares and gives students all of the information they need to make healthy decisions," Huber said. In fact, the NAEA isn't even calling its programs "abstinence only" anymore—now they're "abstinence centered."
Emphasis added, to illustrate how the God squaders are once again trying to obscure their real intentions. And their failures:
The NAEA is also jumping on the science bandwagon; on its AbstinenceWorks website, much of the home page is taken up by a graph showing the decrease in teen pregnancy rates, presumably to demonstrate its programs' effectiveness. The problem? The graph conveniently stops in 2006; the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has actually increased for the second year in a row.
Insert your own Bristol Palin joke here.
An article on a Christian web site (no longer online but quoted in a comprehensive ’05 post about Huber on the now-defunct blog Hypothetically Speaking) described the western Ohio mom's view this way: "Many organizations support abstinence, but it is abstinence until you feel you're ready or simply feel like it. In other words, we're all abstinent until we do it again. Valerie Huber is advocating a different code of morality — the biblical standard of abstinence until marriage."
