Speaking of Sex

Lakita Garth Wright, a former Miss Black California, came to St. Paul this summer to share intimate details of her sex life. Testifying before a small group gathered around a conference table on the twentieth floor of the Crowne Plaza Riverside Hotel, the bubbly ex-beauty queen told the tale of a grandfather who claimed he hadn’t kissed her grandmother until their wedding day. Inspired by this impressive show of self-restraint, Garth Wright vowed, at the age of seventeen, that she too would remain chaste until the day she said “I do.” “And that means,” she said, wagging a well-manicured finger at her audience, “I do you, you do me, and we don’t do anybody else.”

Garth Wright was a featured speaker at the National Abstinence Clearinghouse leadership conference, a three-day event for supporters of so-called abstinence-only sex education. It’s a curriculum that promotes—as do the stop-sign underpants for sale in the exhibit hall—sexual abstinence as the only way young people can be 100 percent sure of preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.

The conference was a homecoming of sorts for national abstinence leaders who came to the Twin Cities for their first such summit eleven years ago and brainstormed ways to get their message out. They’ve succeeded as few such movements have, attaching a $50 million mandate to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act earmarked for states to teach abstinence. A decade later, federal support has grown to  $177 million, for an education initiative that promotes saving sex until marriage and restricts information about condom use and contraception. The movement has powerful bedfellows. President Bush is a strong proponent (Texas, which has the highest teen birth rate in the nation, also receives the most tax dollars—$17 million last year—to promote the virtues of virginity among its teens). So is Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who forced the removal of a comprehensive sex education bill—one that would have mandated an “abstinence-first approach” combined with age-appropriate education on contraception—from an education finance package at the eleventh hour of the 2007 session.

“It’s a Black and White Issue” was this year’s conference theme, though with the notable exception of Garth Wright’s effervescence, the mood among abstinence leaders seemed a little gray. A week earlier, former surgeon general Richard Carmona told Congress that the Bush administration had prevented him from discussing the effectiveness of combining teaching about condoms with abstinence training. “There was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science, but wanted to just preach abstinence, which I felt was scientifically incorrect,” Carmona said. His testimony came on the heels of a nine-year study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that found that preaching to kids about purity had no impact on rates of sexual abstinence and didn’t even delay the average age of their first sexual intercourse.

“The [abstinence] message is good—with or without federal dollars,” insisted Leslee Unruh, founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, preparing her supporters for the possibility that federal funds for such programs might soon disappear. But, a few weeks later, the U.S. House decided to extend federal funding for abstinence programs until the end of September and voted to boost funding of community-based abstinence education by $32 million. The congressional debate is expected to resume again this fall.