Blog Archive

Interesting column from Ross Douthat on the battle over sex ed.  I don’t want to get into the back forth on the topic but it is worth nothing this section:

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

[...]

What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.

But the point I really wanted to highlight, and one I find incredibly frustrating, is this:

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

The debate might be less rancorous if the naturalists and sacralists didn’t have to fight it out in Washington. This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

This strikes me as one of the epic failures of conservatism or the Right writ large.  Power continues to flow to Washington and the federal government. Issues are increasingly nationalized and local control lost or subverted.

It is a language and, to use a problematic word, framing issue that has enormous repercussions. It is not just about how much government spends but who does the spending and how those decisions get made.  DC bureaucracies and national politicians fight this battle and it loses all of its connectivity to local communities and their mores and values.

We seem to send conservatives to DC and get back compromised politicians. And the answer is send different conservatives or citizen legislators or term limits or something else. There was a brief period where devolution was bandied about but all to brief and with little impact beyond some block grants.

No, as with everything else the cultural battle is happening in DC. Lobbyists and consultants are employed to sway the budget battles and then go after the grants and handouts. And we act as if there is only one solution to addressing the issues and so the arguments get heated when millions of dollars are at stake; not to mention the perception of the clash of worldviews – which literally become world views when the battle shifts the UN.

I think no matter where you come down on the sex ed question Douthat’s conclusion is a good one:

America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.

I don’t have a solution but the problem is very real and troubling to me.

But as long as they are, it shouldn’t be Washington’s job to choose between them.