Did ALL Conservatives FLUNK Sex Ed?

We’ve recently seen new gains for the LGBT community, notably for marriage equality in Pennsylvania, Idaho and Oregon this week. I can only imagine the uproar now that the Harvey Milk stamp came out today.  There was a White House ceremony and everything.

So, it follows that we see greater insanity from the radical right in response.

In California, anti-gay groups equate Marriage equality activists with the Klu Klux Klan, in a law suit. No, not that the “Kluckers” have ever been pro-gay, they are just flailing around grasping at anything no matter how ridiculous. This follows the persistent pattern shown by conservatives of:

1. believing things which are not true; and
2. seeing themselves as victims when they are not.

Then we have Rep. Charles Van Zant, a Florida Republican, who has doubled down on his insistence that Common Core will turn every child in our public schools gay. As noted by Think Progress,

“I don’t believe that that has any place being introduced into Florida’s schools,” Van Zant said. He called for Florida’s curricula to only teach courses like history and civics, subjects which he seems to believe are wholly devoid of gay people.”

I’m particularly struck by the notion that anything in any school curriculum COULD alter someone’s sexual orientation. The very premise of that is so badly flawed and without any credible substance or factual merit.

While this was somewhat dealt with by Politifact.com earlier this week, which gave a pants-on-fire rating to Van Zant who had claimed [Common Core would] “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”, I was struck by the notion that Van Zant appears to hold that there might be degrees of same sex orientation — which is as odd as being ‘ a little bit pregnant’ or a little bit heterosexual.

Meanwhile, in Houston, the radical religious right (who REALLY seem to have a warped and anti-ALL sexual bias) are back at it, pushing the false notion that gay and transgender people are all perverts and sexual predators.

In an analysis published a few weeks ago, ADF claimed that the ERO will place “women and children at risk of voyeurism, photographing and video recording, and sexual assault” because of “men in women’s” facilities. The memo also claimed that individuals and churches could be prosecuted — in both cases because they discriminated in either providing services or employment.
These same arguments are apparent in talking points that have been distributed to would-be opponents of the ERO at city council meetings. It blatantly suggests that the protections will lead to rape, “more perverted men to become bold in acting out their perversion,” “sex offenders to roam around public bathrooms,” “physical, verbal, and sexual abuse,” and the promotion of “sexual intercourse in a public setting.” This, the hand-out warns, could expose children to behavior “that should not be so” and may lead them “to start experimenting different acts or things in which they normally would never have done.”
According to Texas Values, the state’s prominent Christian conservative group (and a state affiliate of the Family Research Council), the ERO also “falsely equates race with sexual conduct,” suggesting that sexual orientation is not an “inborn, involuntary, and immutable trait” like race, national origin, sex, and — ironically — religion. The Family Research Council (FRC) chimed in this week as well, describing the bill as celebrating “a radical definition of sexuality.
FRC also highlighted how local conservatives have dubbed the ERO “Mayor Parker’s Sexual Predator Protection Act.” Jared Woodfill, Chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, believes that it “provides an opportunity for sexual predators to have access to our families.” State Rep. Dwayne Bohac (R) similarly believes that the ordinance will protect “men ‘dressing up’ as women to enter and terrorize women and children.”

And like the conservative opposition many years ago the Equal Rights Amendment, the radical and religious right nuts have terrible potty hang ups. Back in the day of the ERA the fear promoted by the right was that we would have ONLY unisex bathrooms – you know, like the ones you have in YOUR HOME – that could be used by either sex.

This is an issue that arose in California, in the context of school bathrooms as a reason to intrude radical right big heavy-handed oppressive government into individual sexual orientation, and it was an issue in other cities with their anti-discrimination ordinances. They seem to be dealing with it, in spite of the hysterical conservatives in their midst.

From Think Progress (or should I just abbreviate it to TP for this link?):

Despite how contentious Houston’s fight has been, the public outcry and unfounded concerns about the consequences of allowing transgender people to safely use the bathroom are identical to when the same fight played out in San Antonio last year. San Antonio’s City Council passed its ordinance, with no exceptions for discriminating against transgender people, by an 8-3 vote.

Exiting the world of bathrooms for the moment, in Michigan conservatives are struggling with the facts of disease and sexual orientation, demonstrating the same failed thinking that they espouse in abstinence only sex ed – that if you don’t give people accurate information or if you express disapproval, no one will have sex… except for minimal efforts at procreation. Because apparently for Conservatives, if no one tells you how, you will never, EVER, figure out how sex works.:

ThinkProgress reached out to the Liberty Counsel Friday morning for clarification as to how maintaining the status quo for marriage might impact the health of people who identify as gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Mandi Campbell, a litigator for the organization, explained that in general, homosexuals cannot — or at least do not — commit to relationships that are both exclusive and permanent. Thus, they cannot enjoy the benefits of marriage. The government’s actions communicate what is “right and wrong” and “good and bad,” and so because of the health consequences associated with gay sex, it should not encourage or endorse that behavior. Campbell confirmed that the Liberty Counsel believes that even though banning same-sex marriage will not change the number of people who identify as gay, it will discourage people from engaging in same-sex sexual behavior.

Meanwhile, in heterosexual news, a conservative judge, running for re-election unopposed, demonstrated the lack of concern by conservatives for the victims of ACTUAL same sex rapists and sexual predators, in contrast to their hysteria for factually deficient concerns about hypothetical same sex offenders:

David Wise was convicted of six felony counts for drugging his wife, raping her in her sleep, and videotaping the rapes. But he won’t spend a day in jail.
Wise was sentenced by an Indiana county judge to eight years of home confinement, and the remaining 12 years of his 20-year sentence suspended. Prosecutors asked for 40 years in prison. His former wife, Mandy Boardman, called the sentence “unfathomable.” “I never thought that he would be at home, being able to have the same rights and privileges as I do,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
Boardman recalled years in which there would be powder residue in her drink. She would wake up with a half-dissolved pill in her mouth. After she found videos of sexual encounters on Wise’s cell phone and confronted him, he wrote in an email to her, “I was taking advantage of you in your sleep and you kept coming to me and telling me it was NOT ok. I needed to stop.” The rapes went on for more than three years unbeknownst to Boardman.
Marion Superior Court Judge Kurt Eisgruber declined to explain his reasoning, particularly because Boardman is appealing the sentence. But he did ask Boardman to forgive Eisgruber during the sentencing hearing, saying, “I hope that you can forgive him one day, because he’s obviously struggled with this and struggled to this day, and I hope that she could forgive him.” He is running for re-election unopposed this November.

Given the inappropriately LIGHT sentences we have seen recently by conservative judges for other sexual predator crimes committed by heterosexual perpetrators, and the lack of any significant conservative outrage, one has to wonder if it is ONLY a pretext on the part of bigots who are homophobic and looking for excuses to discriminate. What cases? In Texas, a judge sentenced a man to 45 days of jail time and some community service at a rape counseling center (without consulting the center first) after he pleaded guilty to raping a 14 year old. In Delaware a really rich guy got just probation for raping his 3 year old daughter. In Montana a teacher got 30 days in jail for raping a student, and in Alabama another sentence of probation for raping a young teen - more than once.

Where is the outrage, the fear, the public pressure for this kind of heterosexual predatory behavior, when it is men viciously committing sexual assault on women and girls, in one case a toddler?

Crickets.

So much for family values. And the right wonders why women don't see them as treating women as equals, or respecting them as human beings?

Who Was It That REALLY Targeted Black Women and babies ? Contrary to Herman Cain, who wrongly blames Planned Parenthood, it was a governmental Eugenics program.

Planned Parenthood is under attack, nationally and here in Minnesota.  The right-wingers like to malign it with factually inaccurate accusations.  One example would be Michel Bachmann's fear-mongering that there was a danger of children being taken by school authorities to Planned Parenthood for abortions, and then getting on the school bus at the end of the day to go home as if nothing had occurred.

That Planned Parenthood lie by Bachmann was debunked pretty effectively. And we posted the debunking of the lie about Planned Parenthood told by Herman Cain repeatedly as well, here, citing the research into his statements by the excellent factcheck.org.

But in the face of the Eugenics / Involuntary sterilization controversy currently taking place in North Carolina, which you can read about, here, there has been a problem in the past, mostly from the 1920s through the 1970s that is currently center stage.  There HAS been targeting of certain groups, which in North Carolina included a disproportionate number of blacks, for sterilization, not abortion. But clearly, sterilization DID disproportionately limit the number of black children being born.

So, what are the facts about black women and babies being targeted?  You certainly will never hear the truth about it from any of the 2012 GOP Presidential contenders.  In fact, there is seldom an accurate statement from any of them on the topic of sex, reproduction, gender orientation, or human sexuality.

But the North Carolina controversy DID make me curious about Eugenics programs in the state of Minnesota.  Being fact-oriented and not factually challenged when it comes to facts relating to sex, gender, or sexuality, I did a little digging, as I am known to do from time to time.

What I found was this fascinating brief history of Eugenics in Minnesota at the Minnesota Historical Society's web site, where you can read more, here:

HISTORY TOPICS

Minnesota Eugenics Society & Founder Charles Fremont Dight

Eugenics was a movement to improve the human species by controlling hereditary factors in mating. The eugenics movement began in the late 1800s in Britain. Francis Galton, an English scientist, coined the term in 1883 and founded the Eugenics Society of Great Britain in 1908. Galton’s philosophy was that humanity could be improved by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children. Galton’s vision of eugenics is usually termed “positive eugenics.” The eugenics movements in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia favored “negative eugenics,” which advocated preventing the least able from breeding. The American Eugenics Society was organized in 1926.
In the early 1920s, Charles Fremont Dight, a physician in Minneapolis, launched a crusade to bring the eugenics movement to Minnesota. He combined the moral philosophy of eugenics with socialism and espoused the idea that the state should administer reproduction of mentally handicapped individuals. His main lines of approach included eugenics education, changes in marriage laws, and the segregation and sterilization of what he called “defective” individuals.
Dight organized the Minnesota Eugenics Society in 1923 and began campaigning for a sterilization law. In 1925 the Minnesota legislature passed a law allowing the sterilization of the “feeble–minded” and insane who were resident in the state's institutions. For the next several legislative sessions Dight fought unsuccessfully for expansion of the law to include sterilization of the “unfit” who lived outside of institutions.
Dight continued his legislative efforts as late as 1935. He spoke and wrote on the subject of eugenics, including over 300 letters to Minneapolis daily newspapers, a 1935 pamphlet on the History and Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement for Human Betterment in Minnesota, and a 1936 book entitled Call for a New Social Order. In 1933 he sent a letter to Adolph Hitler and included with it one of his letters to the editor in which he commended Hitler's work in Germany.
The Minnesota Eugenics Society became moribund by the early 1930s. Dight died on June 20, 1938, in Minneapolis. He left his estate to the University of Minnesota to found what became the Dight Institute for the promotion of Human Genetics.

That made me even more curious; a doctoral dissertation Neal Ross Holtan, from earlier this year on the history of eugenics and the U of MN put the end of the Dight institute at 1988 when it became the Institute for Human Genetics, not the 1960s, as stated in an MPR article from August 2011.  That places our eugenics history a couple of decades more recent, if relatively inactive for sterilization during those later years. 

There was this information on forced sterilization from this University of Minnesota web site:

Number of victims
In total, there were 2,350 victims of sterilization in Minnesota.  Of the 2,350, 519 were male, and 1,831 (approx. 78%) were female. About 18% were deemed mentally ill and 82% mentally deficient. The sterilizations in Minnesota accounted for 4 percent of all the sterilizations in the nation (Lombardo, p. 118).
Period during which sterilizations occurred
The sterilizations took place predominantly between 1928 and the late 1950s.  Sterilizations were relatively high in the 1930s and early 1940s (Paul, p. 393).  During the war, there was a shortage of staff, which may be the reason why there were fewer sterilizations from 1942 to 1946 (Paul, p. 396).

And there were several sources which identify Minnesota as having been one of, if not the most, eugenics conscious states in the U.S.  What I haven't found yet is if the law passed in the first part of the 20th century has been repealed, or if court decisions have simply made it no longer applicable.......or if its provisions have been replaced by other legislation.

Bachmann is that the claims about Planned Parenthood appear to play on the abuses of eugenics sterilization as part of their fear mongering repressive and regressive policies towards sex and reproduction, and especially wrong and bad in the policies they advocate for the terrible failure, abstinence only sex education.

I knew that in some other states, right wing sex paranoia took forms like banning sex toys including vibrators, and that Minnesota had at one time enforced draconian sodomy laws until they were overturned by our State Supreme Court.  What I did not know though turned up in this article, from of all places, that right wing bastion of propaganda, Fox News (you can read the whole article, here):

"Outdated, unthinkable, erotophobic and downright ridiculous, we should thank our lucky stars that enforcing them is another matter.
Sex toys are banned in some states, such as Alabama. Sexual intercourse between unmarried couples is illegal in Georgia. Flirting is banned in San Antonio, Texas. Oral sex is banned in Indiana. Anal intercourse is banned in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Sexual positions beyond missionary are illegal in Washington, D.C. Sleeping naked is illegal in Minnesota."

When I hear Herman Cain, or Michele Bachmann whinging on trying to propagandize culture war issues relating to sex, it seems to me that at least as regards abortion, they are playing on our real history, as a state, and as a nation, of eugenics abuses.  In Minnesota, we turned Eugenics into a study of Genetics, something which empowers people.  If we listen to Cain or Bachmann, and follow their recommendations, we might as well return to that inglorious, backwards and fearful era of another century.  I for one have no desire to return to a right wing dark ages of human sexuality.  Part of pushing back against that right wing fear mongering about abortion targeting blacks and Planned Parenthood being racist is to know our factual history, to recognize the false conflating of abortion and sterilization in the face of right wing fraud.

Ignorance About Sex Is Not Limited to Right Wing Culture Wars

World Contraception Day was September 26, 2011 this year.  Organizations, like USAID, provide contraceptive assistance and education to 54 developing countries, under direction from the State Department. 

Unfortunately, we don't do as well for our own citizens.

The rate of increase in unsafe sex is  among the worst in the United States, of the countries listed in this article.  This can be linked to abstinence-only sex ed funding, like the insertion of funding for failed abstinence only sex ed in 'Obamacare':

The bill restores $250 million over five years for states to sponsor programs aimed at preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by focusing exclusively on encouraging children and adolescents to avoid sex. The funding provides at least a partial reprieve for the approach, which faced losing all federal support under President Obama's first two budgets.
"We're very happy to see that funding will continue so the important sexual health message of risk avoidance will reach American teens," said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. "What better place to see such an important health issue addressed than in the health legislation?"
But the funding was condemned by critics, who were stupefied by the eleventh-hour rescue.
"To spend a quarter-billion dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have already been proven to fail is reckless and irresponsible," said James Wagoner of the Washington group Advocates for Youth. "When on top of that you add the fact that this puts the health and lives of young people at risk, this becomes outrageous."

No surprise, that right wingers like Presidential Candidate contender Rick Perry promotes abstinence-only sex ed as 'working' despite Texas having one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies - and he highest  rate of  REPEAT unintended pregnancies.  It's not just a war on sex ed and accurate medical information being provided to kids and adults, in Texas, there IS an actual war on contraception :

Yet another instance where right wing ideology is not fiscally responsible, and is misogynistic.
From the Ottawa, Sun:

More young people having unsafe sex: Study


LONDON - Young people across the globe are having more unprotected sex and know less about effective contraception options, a multinational survey revealed on Monday.
The “Clueless or Clued Up: Your Right to be informed about contraception” study prepared for World Contraception Day (WCD) reports that the number of young people having unsafe sex with a new partner increased by 111% in France, 39% in the U.S. and 19% in Britain in the last three years.
“No matter where you are in the world, barriers exist which prevent teenagers from receiving trustworthy information about sex and contraception, which is probably why myths and misconceptions remain so widespread even today,” a member of the WCD task force, Denise Keller, said in a statement with the results of the study. 
“When young people have access to contraceptive information and services, they can make choices that affect every aspect of their lives which is why it’s so important that accurate and unbiased information is easily available for young people to obtain,” Keller said. 
The survey, commissioned by Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals and endorsed by 11 international non-governmental organisations, questioned more than 6,000 young people from 26 countries including Chile, Poland and China, on their attitudes towards sex and contraception.
The level of unplanned pregnancies among young people is a major global issue, campaigners say, and the rise in unprotected sex in several counties has sparked concern about the quality of sex education available to youngsters.
In Europe, only half of respondents receive sex education from school, compared to three quarters across Latin America, Asia Pacific and the USA.
Many respondents also said that they felt too embarrassed to ask a healthcare professional for contraception.
“What young people are telling us is that they are not receiving enough sex education or the wrong type of information about sex and sexuality,” spokeswoman for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Jennifer Woodside said in a statement.
“The results show that too many young people either lack good knowledge about sexual health, do not feel empowered enough to ask for contraception or have not learned the skills to negotiate contraceptive use with their partners to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies or STIs (sexually transmitted infections),” she said.
More than a third of respondents in Egypt believe bathing or showering after sex will prevent pregnancy, and more than a quarter of those in Thailand and India believe that having intercourse during menstruation is an effective form of contraception.
But the fact that many young people engage in unprotected sex and the prevalence of harmful myths should not come as a surprise, Woodside said.
“How can young people make decisions that are right for them and protect them from unwanted pregnancy and STIs, if we do not empower them and enable them to acquire the skills they need to make those choices?” she said.

The War on Contraception and Sex Education about contraception is a dangerous and costly problem for our national Public Health policy.  According to the web site of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies, unplanned pregnancies result in a cost of BILLIONS of dollars in direct health care costs each year.  That doesn't begin to address the indirect costs, and the related costs of STDs.

Can we AFFORD misogynistic right wing ideology and policies?

I don't think so.