Virgin: The Untouched History (34 page)

The Act passed, and with it, the rider, known as Title V, Section 510(b). This, as it turned out, was a bill that allocated $50 million per year, for each of five years, to be offered to the states for the purpose of funding programs that promoted chastity. Administered by the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the Department of Human Services, Section 510(b) required that the states provide matching funds at a 3:4 state-to-federal ratio. Total funds per year for the initial five years were $437.5 million. Renewed under the George W. Bush administration after its initial five-year run ended, the funding has consistently increased: federal 510(b) funding for fiscal year 2005 was $273 million.

The way these funds may be used has been exactingly spelled out. Recipients of Section 510(b) money include programs at the state, local, and community levels, educational agencies, and individual school districts. Program content is dictated by a list of eight tenets, none of which may be contradicted. Some programs are additionally prohibited from raising private funds to supplement 510(b) programming with information considered contrary to the eight required messages.

What is to be taught under Section 510(b)? "Abstinence education," defined as "an educational or motivational program" that does the following:

a) has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity; b) teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children; c) teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems; d) teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity; e) teaches that sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects; f) teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child's parents, and society; g) teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increase vulnerability to sexual advances, and h) teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

These are almost exclusively ideological statements. Statements about the harmfulness of sexual activity or even unmarried childbearing are meaningless unless they involve very specific social contexts. Significant rates of unmarried sexual activity have been a constant throughout the twentieth century, yet somehow we continue on the whole not only to survive but to thrive, much of the developed world enjoying standards of living and civil freedoms of which our forebears could only dream. As for the perniciousness of unmarried parenthood, the statistics from many northern European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, as well as Iceland, give the lie to doomsday scenarios. Approximately half of the babies born in Denmark and Sweden are born to unmarried adults, and in Iceland the ratio of births to unwed parents jumps to two-thirds,
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yet in none of these countries has this led to social trauma, economic catastrophe, or even a general hue and cry among the clergy of these Protestant nations.

The other planks of the Section 510(b) agenda are similarly reactionary and shaky. The importance of self-sufficiency prior to sexual debut, for instance, is just another version of the economic argument that for millennia has been used to argue for female virginity prior to marriage. Ironically, part of the reason that economic self-sufficiency is indeed an asset for would-be parents in the United States is that there is little provision for public, subsidized health or child care. To state unequivocally that an individual woman's economic self-sufficiency is the primary factor in whether it is difficult for her to raise a child as a single parent is to put the cart well before the horse. Although a "mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage," as promoted by the 510(b) legislation, may enhance the resources available for childrearing, as generations of women have painfully learned, it is hardly a guarantee.

A similarly ideological, historically shortsighted item of Section 510(b) is its emphasis on monogamy and marriage. While it is generally true that females have historically been expected to refrain from sex prior to marriage, it is also true that males have not. This "expected standard" must perforce be a relatively new invention, and one which arguably owes its existence to gender-egalitarian feminist theory. It also bears noting that if this is indeed a standard expected by some minority of the American populace, it has demonstrably never been the standard
observed by
the vast majority.

Additionally troublesome from a historical and legislative perspective are the words "school-age" and "children." In the United States, public schooling now commonly lasts until age eighteen. But in thirty states, secondary education is only compulsory until a young person reaches the age of sixteen (in another nine states it is seventeen). Therefore, the age at which a young person may be considered school-age can vary considerably, and the end of the school-age period may or may not coincide with the transition to legal adulthood.

This is not the only reason it can be tricky to determine who should be considered an adult and who must be considered a child in America. The federal age of majority is eighteen years of age, but individual state laws make it possible for minors to legally drive cars, hold paying jobs, and in some cases be prosecuted as adults in criminal court.
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With parental consent, depending on state law, it may be possible for minors to marry. At age seventeen, and again with parental consent, minors may join the U.S. military. At the same time, young people must be at least eighteen to vote or buy pornography, and twenty-one to buy or consume alcohol. Even if the question of who is a child is based completely on whether a young person has the legal authority to consent to sex, the age at which this is possible varies from state to state and from fifteen years of age to eighteen. While it would be silly to suggest that Americans are incapable of recognizing the difference between children and adults when dealing with individuals, American law often makes it a confusing task to differentiate between them in legislative terms. Section 510(b) is clearly using the most inclusive possible definition of "child," which is to say including all legal minors as children. But by doing so, Section 510(b) contradicts, in spirit, the letter of many extant state laws.

All these things are troubling. More troubling still, from a political perspective, is that American abstinence-only legislation has generated a top-down ideological program that rests neither on the demands of extant law nor upon the wishes of American voters. Surveys repeatedly find that more than 90 percent of Americans support comprehensive sex education in the schools, and that upward of 80 percent of American adults believe that birth control and safer-sex information should be provided even to teenagers who are not yet sexually active. Abstinence education does not reflect an American popular mandate, but rather an unasked-for imposition of a moral agenda. This is unprecedented in American history and unique among the nations of the contemporary developed world.

It is also, in its public refusal to use the actual word "virginity," both canny and strange.. The word "virginity" appears nowhere in American legislation that deals with the ideal of "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard." One might well wonder why. It seems odd that, having described premarital virginity in detail, they would shy away from simply using the term. It is, after all, what they're talking about.

But it does not appear to be what they want to
be perceived
as talking about. Virginity has, for reasons both valid and not, gotten something of a bad reputation over the course of the twentieth century. In America particularly, a person who is a virgin is often seen as a rarity, perhaps an oddity, probably an unredeemable loser. No wonder AFLA, Section 510(b) programs, and abstinence educators alike seem to prefer to avoid it.

Abstinence, on the other hand, is associated with virtuous self-control. Critically, it offers the impression of choice. One
is a
virgin, but one
chooses
to abstain. Using the word "abstinence" in this context suggests the quintessentially American ideals of self-determination and choice. It verbally transforms compliance with government propaganda into a celebration of personal liberty.

Renaming virginity "abstinence" lifts it out of a web of unpleasant associations and makes it modern. Conveniently, it also sidesteps religious implications: Jesus's mother was not Abstinent Mary. Use of the word "abstinence" is also convenient in that it applies not only to those who have never had sex, but also to those who have already had sex but might be convinced not to do it again. Virginity, after all, is seen as perishable, a one-time-only affair. While the idea of "secondary virginity" is popular in some circles, it is also a problematic term for any number of reasons, not least that it appears to be an oxymoron. Abstinence, on the other hand, can be used in reference to anyone, because a person can abstain from something whether he or she has or hasn't tried it to begin with. Given that approximately 50 percent of American young people have participated in partnered sex by the time they leave high school, the utility of all-encompassing terminology is evident.

Many critics of abstinence-only education have claimed that the abstinence-education agenda is transparently religiously motivated. Indeed, there are numerous connections between the abstinence movement, individual Christians, and Christian denominations more generally. Many recipients of AFLA funding in the early 1980s were religious individuals or organizations who used the funding to help finance the development of abstinence curricula and teaching materials based on overtly religious principles. When Section 510(b) made the teaching of abstinence ideology a condition of granting its educational funding to states and community organizations, those curricula and materials stood poised to supply the market that Section 510(b) created.

An often-cited example is the controversial grade seven to nine curriculum
Sex Respect.
A joint production of Catholic sex educator Coleen Kelly Mast, whose other titles include
Love and Life: A Christian Sexual Morality Guide
for Teens,
and an organization based in Glenview, Illinois, called the Committee on the Status of Women (founded by longtime archconservative Phyllis Schlafly),
Sex Respect
was funded in part by a $391,000 AFLA grant awarded in 1985. Creation of a similar curriculum intended for a high-school audience,
Facing Reality,
it was funded by a three-year, $300,000 AFLA grant awarded in 1990. Mast is now considered one of the leading experts on abstinence education. Her résumé includes having been one of four Americans chosen to participate in a 1996 conclave on "Education for Chastity" held by the Vatican. Mast's curricula, which have been lambasted by the press as well as by scientific organizations for their medical inaccuracies and for instances of racial and other bias, are used in over two thousand American public school districts.

Religion collides with federal funding in the production of abstinence-education materials in a very different way in the case of the program called Free Teens USA. A recipient of Section 510(b) funding, Free Teens USA is run by a group of individuals with strong ties to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's controversial Unification Church. In 2003 reporter John Gorenfeld, writing for the online magazine
Salon,
divulged the results of his spelunking into federal files made accessible through the Freedom of Information Act. Free Teens administrators have headed statewide Unification Church branches, worked for Unification Church—owned companies, including the gun manufacturer Kahr Arms, and worked as senior financial officers within the central Unification Church. The Unification Church claims no official ties to Free Teens, but this is often the case for Moon-affiliated front organizations. It must be said that Free Teens abstinence education conforms quite well with the Unification stance on sexuality, which holds that any sexual experience outside of marriage is an abomination, even to the point that the Reverend Moon has advocated (in 1992) that women who are sexually attacked should kill themselves rather than go through the "fall" of being raped.

Religion also plays a role in abstinence education through the secular adaptation of teaching methods and strategies devised for use in religious contexts. Beginning in the early 1990s, evangelical Christian ministries targeting adolescent and young-adult populations began to form groups and create programs specifically designed to deal with what they view as a cultural onslaught against sexual purity. The best known of these, and one of the oldest, is True Love Waits, run by Life Way Christian Resources, an operation of the Southern Baptist Convention. In addition to producing and licensing a number of products, including sportswear, stickers, and jewelry, True Love Waits also offers a number of counseling, educational, and motivational programs.

True Love Waits' most distinctive offering by far, however, is the True Love Waits Commitment Card. This is a simple piece of paper, with space for a signature at the bottom, that reads: "My Commitment: Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."

True Love Waits' pledge cards have proven popular, a staple of TLW's small community groups as well as massive regional rallies. A similar pledge-taking phenomenon called the Silver Ring Thing puts a fifteen-dollar silver ring on the pledge-taker's left ring finger (the same finger on which Americans traditionally wear their wedding rings) as an outwardly visible sign that one has taken the pledge. Approximately eighty other religious virginity-pledge groups, including the Unification Church's Pure Love Alliance, exist and have modified this pledge process for their own uses. So have numerous abstinence curricula intended for use in public schools.
Sex Respect
includes a version that reads "I, [the undersigned], promise to abstain from sex until my wedding night. I want to reserve my sexual powers to give life and love for my future spouse and marriage. I will respect my gift of sexuality by keeping my mind and thoughts pure as I prepare for my true love. I commit to grow in character to learn to live in love and freedom." Although this and other secularized versions omit references to God, the Bible, and other explicitly religious concepts, they do exude a sanctimonious odor.