Abstaining

But… but… wingnuts love throwing money at ineffective programs! Missile defense, anyone?

too awesome.now, what about the fired gay linguist? This is the first issue I’m really taking Obama to task on. As commander in chief, he can reinstate this guy if he wants.

Jeff,ADM. Sestak answered the “reinstatement” question perfectly. Obama COULD do whatever he wants but there is a law(fucking stupid unethical law). Obama can’t just go around the law or we will have another BUSH. I voted against tyranny last election.

couldn’t he do it by executive order?

kyle,Ineffective programs? What’s ineffective about abstaining from sex?It ALL comes down to personal choice, which is something liberals don’t seem to get, or maybe don’t WANT to get.If you’re going to have sex, you still have to CHOOSE to wear the condom. That teenagers have been given free condoms, and STILL don’t use them should tell you everything you need to know about addressing this issue from the “free condoms work” side of things.Yes, it’s just not realistic to expect young people to make good life choices, so we should all lower our expectations, and pretty soon, we’ll expect nothing from anyone.Yes, that’ll be a world full of joy.

@GI: Exactly. And I wish Rachel and Keith, et. al, would stop explaining that fact in a really half-assed, “We actually believe Obama is just rationalizing his bad behavior” tone. I love them, but they are falling into the trap that the right always said the left would fall into once we got someone of our party in office. What if Dick Cheney wins the presidency in 2012 and decides freedom of speech is unjust? The president shouldn’t be able to suspend laws he disagrees with, even if it seems a majority of people agree with him as well.

@pooper:I’m not against teaching and encouraging abstinence. The programs I speak about are abstinence-only programs, which I do have a big problem with.

Whats ineffective from abstaining from sex?Something that is never practiced cannot be effective.If most of a decade of numbers proving that abstinence-only education does not work, then what are you arguing about it for?We can’t expect kids to act like adults in our society and charge them as adults and then not expect them to engage in other adult behavior.If so much damn time is spent convincing them they should be acting like adults already…. hey, they are going to.Reap the consequences of our nazified school systems that spend more time on enforcing the rules and punishment than education and human developement.

Cutting programs that have been proven via mounds and mounds of empirical evidence not to work?Outrageous!

PPP, you’re the King Of Disingenuous, or you have serious comprehension problems. To your credit, I think it’s the former.It’s abstinence-ONLY programs that aren’t being favored anymore. Of course it’s a matter of choice. But policies based on listening to the christian conservative kooks give teens only one choice when it comes to sexual health and safety: Don’t have sex. And they expected that to work! I remember talking to a kook who told me that Clinton was the worst president ever because she’d heard so many then-recent news stories about oral sex in high schools, and therefore he was responsible for the corruption of all these kids. As if it took Clinton getting a hummer in the White House to convince teenagers that oral sex is fun!So sure, it’s about personal choice. It always has been. But there are lots of choices available that make sex safer, and it was a stupid move, designed purely to pander to what was then the christian conservative “base”, to only present one of them. So I’m glad that’s changing.

Monsieur LePooper, where is your self-righteous response?

When study after study has shown that abstinence-only programs not only give out false and misleading information, but that they are not even effective in their stated goal of encouraging kids to delay having sex, I’m amazed that we’re still debating this issue. But then I remember that we’re dealing with the fantasy world that wingnuts live in. The fact that studies have shown that teens who wear promise rings or other such abstinence only pledges are not any less likely to delay having sex than other teens, but they are less likely to use condoms or other forms of protection is just irrelevant to wingnuts.And at this point, I don’t know if Pooper is just being a contrarian or if he really is just so thick that he doesn’t understand that difference between practicing abstinence and the abstinence only programs pushed by wingnuts.

@JI agree with you. Maddow and Olbermann have been irritating me with that. We bitch about how Bush on many occasions on certain issues went above the law, whether through executive orders, signing statements, etc. They forget that DADT is federal law and the best way for him to repeal it is through Congress. We can’t fall into that trap of complaining every time the Pres. does something liberals don’t like or doesn’t do things we want or is not doing something as quickly as we want.