by Mona Charen
Barack Obama assumed the presidency determined not just to promote
certain policies but to tidy up our minds as well. Some things we'd
been saving, like conservative ideas on national defense and such,
would have to go. Those were "the failed policies of the past," and he
would not tolerate people clinging to them. Obama enthusiast and New
York Times editor Sam Tanenhaus thought he was writing an epitaph when
he published "The Death of Conservatism" six months ago.
But we have not cooperated. More to the point, the facts have not
cooperated. That $787 billion stimulus that was guaranteed to keep
unemployment at 8 percent or less is now regarded by 75 percent of
Americans as a corrupt flop. Seventy-one percent say underwear bomber
Abdulmutallab should have been handed over to the military. And 58
percent say he should have been waterboarded.
Now we learn, from a study in the Archives of Pediatrics and
Adolescent Medicine end ital that another prematurely buried
conservative idea, abstinence education, works very well indeed.
The Obama administration had disdained and defunded abstinence
education in favor of "evidence-based" programs to prevent teen
pregnancy. (Note the assumption that liberal ideas are founded on
evidence whereas conservative ideas spring from prejudice, ignorance or
downright orneriness.) No one study settles things, but this one,
conducted by an African-American professor from the University of
Pennsylvania, will be hard to ignore.
http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2010/02/05/another_undead_conservative_idea
February 5, 2010 4:00 A.M.
Killing Abstinence
What teens and parents have to lose.
This
week, the media gave us what appeared to be startling news: Research,
appearing in a journal published by the American Medical Association,
showed (shock!) that abstinence programs dramatically reduced teen
sexual activity.
No one knowledgeable about abstinence
education, however, would find this startling. In fact, eleven previous
sound studies showed strong positive effects from abstinence programs.
The mainstream media simply ignored them. Unfortunately, the most
recent story came too late — President Obama and House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi have already terminated the federal government’s abstinence programs.
What other story has the mainstream media ignored? The big one concerns
the positive effects of abstinence on teens. Obviously, abstinent teens
are not going to get pregnant or contract an STD. But the research
shows that, in general, they also will be happier and less depressed
than their permissive peers.
Abstinent teens also do
dramatically better in school. They are half as likely to drop out as
their sexually active peers. And teens who abstain until at least age
18 are twice as likely to attend and graduate from college as those who
become sexually active while in high school. The extra schooling
achieved by abstaining teens will add, on average, an additional
$400,000 to their lifetime earnings.
Skeptics might wonder if
this effect occurs solely because some sexually active girls have
babies and are forced to leave school; however, in this comparison,
such cases have been left out. Perhaps abstinent teens come from better
socio-economic backgrounds and are therefore more likely to go to
college anyway? Nope, the stark differences in educational
accomplishment persist, even when the abstaining teen is compared to a
sexually active teen from the exact same background.
http://article.nationalreview.com/424073/killing-abstinence/robert-rector