ABC

Steve Benen enlightened me today of the fight at capitol hill to do away with abstinence only education. In fact, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, a religious right organization, claims that, "“Liberals Want Federal Abstinence Education Cut."

It's true! Their report states, "President Bush’s 2009 budget proposal includes $204 million to support Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE), but dozens of liberals in Congress want all abstinence money axed from the budget." Their concern to "defend" the mis-education of sex to our teens comes at time that the CDC reports 1 in 4 teen girls has a sexually transmitted infection (STI). 

I have always been an advocate for quality education in our publics schools and that is not limited to sex. Benen adds, "It’s quite simple: the evidence that abstinence-only is more effective doesn’t exist." It doesn't take a genius to figure that our either. One only needs to do research for about a day to gather evidence to counter the administrations claims.

ABC News reports, "the Journal of Adolescent Health found that those who received comprehensive sex education were 50 percent less likely to become pregnant than those who received abstinence-only education. The study also found that those who received comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to become pregnant than those who received no sex education at all." It's quite evident that Bush Administration has fudged everything the past 8 years and his approach to "abstinence-only" education is one of them. The reason why the CDC found such alarming ratings of STI's among teen girls should be a wake up call to all Americans but in particular parents that the last 8 years of abstinence only education has not been cutting it. 

ABC has excluded Kucinich, Gravel and Hunter from the Saturday primetime debate. Kucinich filed a complaint with the FCC citing a violation of equal-time provisions. ABC has responded by explaining that they had extablished benchmarks in order to filter the field of candidates due to the depth of the questions.

 I think that it is a mistake to negate eligble candidates the opportunity to debate. It sends a clear signal to the average viewer who does not have the time to keep up with every candidate that if the candidate is not on stage, they must not be participating anymore. Although I will acknowledge that the original intentions of ABC were benevolent in order to make the debates more productive it is obvious that the number of candidates has dwindled with Biden and Dodd stepping out. Thus, a news network does not have to decide who it invites to debates, the people will stop voting or supporting a candidate that forces them to step down. The media should not deny nor cherrypick the candidates it wishes to expose to the voters. That's the job of us, the voters!