Bush''s Sex Fantasy

Federally funded abstinence education has been around since 1996, when Clinton's welfare reform bill provided grants to states to teach abstinence. Under Bush, though, it has expanded dramatically, from $97.5 million when he took office to $270 million next year. Bush has also retooled abstinence-only funding so that most of it is given directly to private groups, several of them evangelical religious organizations, and he has put it under the same agency that runs his faith-based initiatives.

For health and social service experts, however, that presents one basic problem: There is no scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs work. Some studies are inconclusive; others find, unambiguously, that the programs don't work. Yet there's one way in which they're clearly effective -- as a massive patronage system for the religious right. Bill Smith, legislative director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS, a nonprofit research and lobbying group that advocates comprehensive sex education, calls abstinence-only grants "political pork."

"This president clearly needs to shore up the right wing of his party," Smith says. "It's not a mistake that in his State of the Union address he suggested doubling domestic spending on these programs. It's an election year and he has to give them something to get their votes."

Bush's involvement with the abstinence-only movement stretches back over a decade and is about more than just electoral politics. It's a case study in the right's subversion of science. Their ideas rejected by mainstream scientists, conservatives have built their own scientific infrastructure, which then buttresses once-derided theories in the political arena. This administration recruits its scientists from that right-wing counterintelligentsia, which has been funded by some of the same groups that are now collecting taxpayer money to teach abstinence-only programs instead of traditional sex education.

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