In the words of a former presidential candidate, “Oops.’’ Elayne Bennett - president and founder of Best Friends, and wife of former education secretary William Bennett - put out a statement correcting the record. Her program can still promote marriage, she said. It just can’t mention abstinence anymore.
In a way, it’s hard to fault Santorum for confusion; when grand policy ideas get translated into block grants and line-items, it’s easy to muddle the details. Best Friends, it turns out, is funded through the “Healthy Marriage Initiative,’’ a Bush-era program designed to “promote healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood.’’ A few years after its inception, a government report pointed out that some community programs were using “Healthy Marriage’’ funds to offer abstinence education. The Obama administration put a stop to that: No abstinence talk, it told the programs, or no funds.
In an e-mail to me last week, Bennett raised the more accurate objection: Shouldn’t programs be able to bring up abstinence, at least as one viable option? “The word abstinence was not to be discussed or to appear in any curriculum materials,’’ Bennett wrote. “This seemed unreasonable not to present it simply as a choice.’’
Alas, that’s what has become of sex education: It’s forever a political football, rather than the vital social tool it ought to be. That was true under the Bush administration, too, which only provided sex education grants to schools if they taught abstinence-only education.
Those grants came from a program known as Title V, and under Bush, programs that received them had to follow eight rules. Some sounded reasonable: Programs had to teach young people how to reject sexual advances, and how alcohol and drug use could leave them vulnerable. But some advanced ideas that had little to do with teen pregnancy or STDs: Programs had to teach that sex outside of marriage “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.’’
